Leveraging Your Waiting Room, Or Hammer Them While Their Static And Unsuspecting!

By now, you will have guessed that I think the experience you offer your Patient is the key to your success in maximising the returns of your Practice. It is probably obvious that I think that this concept should be a large part of your strategic Practice Management. Never would have guessed huh? The photo of the waiting room to the left is a diagram of how not to do it by the way.

So with this in mind, as I was navel gazing last night, something which I very occasionally do, about leveraging a waiting room/receptionist area in a practice. I came to the usual conclusions about decor, furnishings, comfort levels, choice of pictures etc. I then had an idea about an extension of what I have been advising my customers to do for some time.

I have been advising them to place TVs in their waiting/reception areas, in order that they can leverage the nice videos that manufacturers make available to them. But also to run self designed and deployed PowerPoint animations on advertising latest offers and campaigns. I told them set it to a fifteen minute loop and just let it run during the day.

What struck me last night was that while that was good use of waiting time there was an element that could have real power that I had not discussed, A Practice Message. A message from the owner of the practice, HD quality video but soft focus, cmon, I don’t know about you but soft focus probably ain’t going to cut it for me, I might need a mask. In any way, Practice owner at his or her desk welcoming people to their parctice.

This is eeezy peezy stuff here, good HD camcorder, tripod, storyboard the shots, arrange the dialogue, speak the dialogue in your normal voice, ensure that there is feeling in your words, shoot several takes of each storyboard, edit and splice the best together, voila, Practice Message. So to give you a clear idea of what I mean please read the following.

Shot opens, wide angle, slow zoom to Geoff at Desk, don’t frighten the children, don’t frighten the children, Geoff, big ass smile, yes you done it, the children are frightened,“I would just like to take the time to welcome you to our practice, I have been involved in the profession for, insert number of years here, and I have been at this practice for, insert number of years here, I actually became involved in the Hearing profession purely by accident, true for me explain why you did, but I quickly came to appreciate the satisfaction delivered to me when I assisted a Patient to recover the joy of hearing in their daily life, so our commitment to care for our Patients here is not truly selfless, big ass smile, Again, welcome, please make your self comfortable, have some refreshments and I or one of my associates will be with you shortly”, big ass smile, pause and then cut to powerpoint.

So, short, sweet and to the point, powerful? Engaging? I think so, what about you? Why stop at your practice waiting room, if you think it has power, embed it on your website. Just navel gazing as I said, but maybe it might assist you with the experience in your practice. Oh and before I forget, caption your videos, the process is not hard and will be appreciated by our Patients. Subtitles are gods own gift to the hard of hearing.

Regards

Geoff 

A little embarrassed here, but apparently somebody got there before me with this particular idea. A group called the Hearing News Network supplies centralised services pushed out to their equipment in your office. Their website can be viewed here