Interactive Refractive

admin January 31st, 2008

Many Doctor’s and Refractive Coordinators are so swamped with the details of doing their job. The daily level of office activity leads to the false assumption that their phones must have been answered properly to have generated such a huge volume of work. Time and again, when real calls are recorded and reviewed, we see that Administrator’s and Doctor’s preconception of these calls does not necessarily match their reality.

In actuality, phones are often answered by unprepared, uninformed, unenthused and often uncaring staff. Most of us experience poor customer service in some form every day, but when delivered over the phone it is most frustrating. When poorly treated, the customer’s choice is to deal with it or go elsewhere. “Can you please hold?” Most people don’t want to!

Our goal as a leader in the ophthalmology industry should be to always stand out as exceptional. There are no second chances to make a first impression. A bad first impression in the competitive Lasik and IOL market, simply leads to your potential customer finding someone else. It’s hard to imagine how disposable your premium lasik services really are. On recorded calls from practices across the country, we often hear the same potential client shopping price at competing practices. We’re here to tell you from experience, you are disposable until the caller has decided that you are the right place for them.

But how do you make the consumer realize that you are the best choice? The answer is to match your perception to your reality, and to become as excellent as you think you can be.

We have made over 400 secret shop calls to practices nationally over the past 3 months. During this time, we were able to reach a counselor directly only 66% of the time! The other 33% of calls were either transferred to voicemail, or asked to leave a message. Of the counselors reached directly, just under 1/3 of them, or in total about 18% of the calls, resulted in any effort to keep us as an active lead.

With our ACE program, we have the ability to listen to real patient calls for practices, we monitor every call. On average, before the ACE program is implemented, most practices were losing 30% of their new lasik leads by not capturing any information from the patient before ending the call. With a few changes we can help “lost leads” become a thing of the past.

Many practices boast a 90% phone inquiry to consult conversion, but don’t actually capture every lead. In effect they only convert 50-60% of their inquiries into consultations because the only calls documented are those willing to commit to a consultation now. Everyone else became a lost lead. Talk about missed opportunity! The stakes are high when each incoming call represents upwards of $5000 a pair of eyes. If the initial caller does not enter your financial funnel, most likely they will find another. Our point, lead capture is essential when in today’s market every call counts. The ACE program’s crux is lead capture and cultivation, but that’s not all. There is much more involved in maximizing your potential along with bettering your potential client’s experience.

Treating Lasik and IOL callers as if they were regular ophthalmology patients calling for the first time is one of the biggest mistakes that practices make. Answering Lasik calls like this……“Can you please hold? ,” or “ The price? Oh it’s $2600 per eye. Is that all ?, ok then, bye now.” …are more common than you can imagine and have a grave effect on the bottom line. Remember, these folks do not consider themselves to be patients of yours yet, nor do they have the time or patience to deal with poor service.

Here’s nine ways to improve your lasik calls and avoid the average practice’s pitfalls.

1. Capture every lead routinely
2. Ensure that calls follow a format that maximizes the potential of gaining new business
3. Assign informed and well educated counselor’s to handle your lasik and IOL calls
4. Script your lasik calls in advance so you can dependably predict the outcome
5. Ensure that your staff is kind and correct on every call.
6. Call your own office as a patient to experience and improve upon your own front office
7. Research your competition and improve upon their style
8. Allow your staff to answer lasik calls uninterrupted
9. Prepare to make mistakes and accept that they will be made. The key is to learn from them while maintaining morale which ultimately reflects on your call quality.

Imagine if every call were handled as if the caller had reached the most knowledgeable person in your office, every time, without interruptions or unnecessary holds. That’s our perception. It’s up to you to match your perception to your own reality. You may soon be busier than you ever imagined.

About the author of this article: Bill Mercier is the president and CEO of OptiCall, Inc, a provider of consumer communications solutions for the refractive industry which increases conversion rates of prospective callers into viable patient consultations.

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obirsen January 24th, 2008

Aligning Responsibilities and Expectations in An Increasingly Competitive SEO World
By Onur Birsen, CPA, MBA

When is the search engine optimizer responsible for failure and when is it the client’s fault? Can clear lines be drawn between the borders of responsibility and when is the equation right for success? In this article, I attempt to provide some insight into these critical questions by making an analogy to a simple expression commonly used in basketball called a ”triple double”. A triple-double is defined as an individual performance in a game in which a player accumulates double-digit totals (i.e., 10 or more) in any three of these categories: points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocked shots.

All professional search engine optimizers agree that it’s their job to educate clients as much as possible so that they have realistic expectations about results. However, in some cases, even if the search engine optimizer does just that, clients can have difficulties coming to terms with certain basic facts about SEO. Of course, SEO is very technical and can be difficult to understand. Also adding to the stress, it’s their money on the line. They want to get a quick ROI like in any other business, but in today’s SEO world, “quick” is just NOT feasible unless some very important and specific set of requirements are met on three levels. These requirements (two pre-requisites, two client responsibilities, two search engine optimizer responsibilities) form the basis of my concept for achieving a “triple double” in SEO:

The Double Pre-Requisites for Quick SEO Success

1. The domain name to be used for the optimized website needs to been registered and live for at least two to three years without ever being banned, blacklisted or penalized by internet authorities.
2. The website using the aforementioned domain name must have a healthy number of quality incoming links. Although figures can vary greatly from one sector to the other, as a rule of thumb 100 or more unique incoming links can be considered healthy for a rural LASIK market, and 1000 or more unique incoming links can be considered healthy for a competitive LASIK market. (For help with determining the number of incoming links to your website please contact us)

It should be noted that the word “quick” is a relative term, and in the world of SEO, quick usually means approximately three months.

My experience with SEO in the last 8 years has shown me that a large portion of clients who want SEO services have domain names and websites that do not satisfy the pre-requisites above. As a result, it is an unfortunate fact that for the most part, expectations by clients and actual early SEO results by search engine optimizers often don’t align.

Clients, generally speaking:

1. Want guarantees about performance before putting down significant sums of money and expect to see results in a short period of time.
2. Want to see “top rankings” for a small number of specific keywords they feel are very important.

On the other hand, SEO providers:

1. Reject guarantees and can only provide rough estimates for the time frames for “success”.
2. Believe SEO is much more than achieving top rankings for a few “priority” keywords.

The magic element for success is an honest reconciliation between the two parties involved. In order to achieve this, both sides need to clearly understand their responsibilities. These two sets of responsibilities for each side complete the “triple double” in SEO.

The Double Responsibilities of the SEO Client:

Be patient and prepare for the process. Assuming the domain name is not brand new, the typical SEO campaign starts delivering results within three months. For new domain names and websites, this can take up to one to two years. Clients may want to call each week asking where the results are. Rather, they should communicate with their SEO company about how to get involved and speed up the process. They should also be prepared for additional recommendations and requests from the search engine optimizer that fall outside the original contract and related budget. During implementation, optimizers frequently uncover new issues and challenges which were not possible to determine at the beginning of the project. Don’t downplay these strategies in order to save money because they may be what are needed to get you to the top.

Contribute, since search engine optimizers cannot be expected to learn everything about your business. While they are implementing the SEO strategy, clients will have to contribute by approving keywords and content, pursuing links and write articles. Genuine content can not be made up by non-experts. If you make your SEO write your content it may discredit you in the long run. Provide all of the content, and then let the search engine optimizers work their magic on the words and sentences to make the content more SEO friendly.

The Double Responsibilities of the SEO:

Explain to clients what their expected involvement during any portion of the campaign will be. Most clients don’t mind getting involved, but nobody likes getting tasks assigned to them when they thought someone else would be taking care of them. If more programming and development may be involved and extra funds are likely to be required due to a competitive marketplace, let clients know of these possibilities before they sign on the dotted line.

Treat each campaign individually. Certain strategies that work for one project may not work well for another. The resources where you go to find links, the keyword density in the content, the types of keywords used and the structure of the website pages will have vary from one clients website to another. The search engine optimizer must take these details into consideration and formulate plans which are specific to the challenge.

Conclusion:

Achieving a triple double in a search engine optimization campaign comes as a result of the understanding and fulfilling of responsibilities by both the search engine optimizer and the client. Assuming this is accomplished, the speed at which the “SEO triple double” will come depends on whether or not the double pre-requisites mentioned at the beginning of this article are met. Three to 6 months is a fair time-frame to accomplish a “triple double” if the pre-requisites are met. Otherwise, when starting out with a new domain name and no incoming links, clients should be ready to wait one to two years before seeing any significant results.

Most importantly, it should never be overlooked that the success of a business itself lies solely with the owner of that business. Therefore, clients must be sure that their businesses can succeed with or without a triple double in SEO. Just like a basketball team needs to play as a team, and win a game regardless of a single player racking up a triple double, a company needs to be able to succeed without SEO in the first place.SEO should be like the butter on top of the bread. Any business solely depending on a SEO for success will probably fail anyway, regardless of the SEOs success or failure.

About the author of this article:

Onur Birsen, M.B.A, C.P.A. is currently a partner and the Chief Technical Officer of Glacial Multimedia, Inc. He has been lecturing for over 6 years within the medical community on the topic of search engine optimization, and holds a degree on e-commerce from Harvard University.

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mdobkowski January 24th, 2008

Lasik Price and Lasik Pricing Related Problems

Over the past ten years LASIK has become a very common form of laser vision correction. Millions of people have had successful LASIK eye surgery. More than 1 million Americans will most likely undergo LASIK surgery this year, and the majority will get improved vision. This relatively safe procedure can be very effective when provided by an experienced LASIK surgeon. With the success of this procedure has also come attempts to create the southwest airlines business model for LASIK. Although these corporate centers are not always successful, the state of the LASIK eye surgery business has moved closer to commodity levels. But has LASIK eye surgery become a commodity? Is this a good or a bad thing for prospective LASIK patients? What will this mean to the independent ophthalmologists and the small practices?

By definition a commodity is a homogeneous and undifferentiated product sold largely on the basis of price. Commodities are sold on price not on features and benefits or the quality nature of a product. Has LASIK eye surgery entered this realm? It is hard for me to grapple with the concept that this type of eye surgery has really met this level. It is hard for me to ascertain that someone would choose a low price for eye surgery over a quality surgical option. It does happen, however; the LASIK eye surgery business is not at the commodity stage yet! Some corporate LASIK centers would like prospective patients to think that getting LASIK is like buying sugar or electricity, however; the reality is that quality practices can still differentiate! Despite the surge of illegitimate LASIK advertising claiming “LASIK as low as $199.99″ or other bait and switch advertising techniques we somehow find the state of this medical procedure not in the depths of commodity, but in a position to add further differentiation. Although discount providers often advertise that LASIK is available for only a couple hundred dollars, many ASCRS members and leading market research experts, note and debate that the actual price of LASIK from a discounter averages $1000.00-$1500.00 per eye for the conventional procedure and in many cases higher than that for custom LASIK. (ASOA LASIK Marketing Roundtable ASCRS 2006)

There is no corporate center that has completely turned their business model into the southwest airlines of LASIK eye surgery. In fact many of these corporate centers have difficulty and have posted low earnings in years past.  The question for your practice becomes do we just surrender or do we differentiate and compete? As an Internet marketing consultant I hear a lot of stories about selling LASIK based on pricing and how unfair this is. The good news is that you still have time to differentiate your practice but the bad news is that you have to deal with misleading advertisers because Federal and State regulation is rare.

Misleading Advertising

Both Federal and State regulators have taken some action against misleading advertisers, but enforcement and regulation seldom occurs. It takes a lot of time and resources to pursue legal action against a corporation and not many doctors have this kind of time. The fact of the matter is that LASIK is surgery! Patients need a quality surgeon with experience and one that can determine candidacy! It still baffles me that lasik is still done on patients who are clearly not good candidates.

For More Information regarding deceptive LASIK advertising watch! Please visit www.savelasik.com

Can your LASIK Practice differentiate itself from the competition? TIPS for differentiating your practice

There are other differentiation ideas so check back with our website on a regular basis for NEW articles relating to differentiating your LASIK business.

1. Using Your Patients To Differentiate

Ophthalmology Social Search 101

In Internet marketing we are seeing increased results and awareness of social search usage. Social search can be detected on blogs, facebook, and even the new Kristin Cavaleri website developed by VISX (If you have not seen this it is a must see). I am often surprised to see very few patient stories on websites of refractive practices. This is a surefire way to differentiate your practice! Oftentimes practices will even have a book of letters at the practice. These patient testimonials need to become part of the overall differentiation strategy and eventually used on the Internet. With the increase in reality shows, and social networking it is important to grasp the value of a system geared toward attracting patients through this medium. There is a reason that word of mouth referrals dominate lead generation for practices all over the country.

2. Using EyeOR or Intraocular Refractive Surgery to differentiate your entire refractive surgery business!

Differentiate your practice with unique procedures

If we want to be able to offer refractive surgery to all perspective patients we must realize that LASIK alone will not get us there. For many years now the refractive surgery business has been under siege by price discounting corporate lasik centers driving this surgery to a near commodity level. The features and benefits of laser vision correction have become blurred. Product differentiation has been difficult for many practices to achieve. Bait and switch low priced advertising has been effective in attracting patients and the playing field has weak enforcement mechanisms to prevent this style of marketing. The overall effect is the commoditization of refractive surgery. With the advent of Intraocular multi-focal lenses,  practices now have a new opportunity to differentiate their offerings. SEE:  www.eyeor.com

3. Doing what is best for the patient!

Refractive surgery candidates come in many shapes and sizes with varying levels of age. Each candidate has a unique situation. Lasik is not right for everyone. By having a wide base of surgical choices for your patients you can open the door to a new value proposition. The new position is quite simple. Provide surgical solutions that are the best for each patient. If the patient is 50 years old they might consider refractive lens exchange, If the patient is very myopic with a thin cornea but young maybe consider the new Visian ICL. Practices can do a good thing for their patients by offering multiple solutions for their unique situation. As a surgeon you can feel good about suggesting the best procedure for them not the most convenient. This is the first step to differentiating your refractive surgery business.

4. Create a value proposition and differentiation statement

Practices need to review their current communication strategies and create a differentiation statement that will surely be different than others. Does your practice have a value proposition? If not you should consider spending a little time to create such a document and furthermore educate and train your practice employees as to the merits of such communication. If your team understands the goals of the practice and has methodology for implementing these ideas you may be surprised that your internal patients converting to LASIK increases or that your word of mouth continues to grow.

You may understand that LASIK isn’t a commodity and you may also know what separates you and makes you different from your competition. Have you ever asked your practice employees what the main points of differentiation for your practice are? Have you ever invited your techs and COTs to a marketing meeting that discusses the practice value proposition and differentiation statement? Your staff has direct contact with patients and routinely has the opportunity to educate patients and interject their opinions on the matter. If your employees are not empowered to do this then they will fail at delivering this information. A simple marketing meeting with a marketing manager may make a tremendous difference and as the practice makes progress in this area good things will happen.

5. Develop a great and informative ophthalmology website

Developing a nice website with great information, patient education, and easy to navigate page structures can not only help you find new patients, but it is a great method of practice differentiation. If you are a practice that uses state of the art technology but has a very ugly website, you have a double standard in effect. The patient will actually question the technological capability if you present a poor practice website just like they would if the office was dirty and messy. For a small cost any practice can have a nice and functional website. What you choose to do to promote the website is a whole other story (SEE Building Brand New Ophthalmology Websites Article)

There are many other differentiation ideas so check back with our website on a regular -basis for NEW articles relating to differentiating your LASIK business.

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Page Topics Include: Is LASIK a commodity?, LASIK pricing, LASIK commodity, alternatives to misleading LASIK advertising, differentiating your lasik practice, 5 differentiation TIPS for lasik practices, In office surgical suites, intraocular surgery suite consultants, LASIK patient testimonials, LASIK pricing

According to the FTC, an advertisement is deceptive under the Federal Trade Commission Act if it contains a material representation or omission of fact that is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances. Advertisers are also responsible for claims that are reasonably implied from their statements. These rules apply to all advertisements, including consumer testimonials. In addition, advertisers must be able to substantiate all objective claims they make about a product or service.

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