Grow your Network or Know your Network

In a previous post, we emphasized the importance of trust as the most important asset in an Optometry practice. Gaining the patient’s trust is difficult, but it helps sustain yet grow profitability as well as your patient bade. Losing a patient’s trust is easy, and it destroys your reputation, profitability, and patient base. Being able to attain a high patient satisfaction rate needs a lot of work but it helps you build a reliable network.

Many practitioners confound patients and contacts with connections and network. A contact is a person that you know, you have provided him with eye care services, but with whom you have not set up a strong relationship. Some Optometrists focus on growing the patient base without giving importance to building strong relationships with patients. Building strong relationship with patients does not mean to receive your patients for a barbecue party. Building strong relationships with patients consist of exceeding the patient’s expectations through the service you provide; provide eye care solutions to patients that improve their lives through the choices we present that he didn’t know they existed and that can improve the performance of his vision even when no symptoms are relevant.

Those strong relations lead to the Optometrists building a network of connections. And those patients in the network trust your services and become your source of referral as they promote your practice to their friends and help grow your network. If you succeed in building good relations with patients and referrals you grow your network with deeper relationships instead of growing your network with broader contacts.

Referral-based marketing consists of building long-term relationships. To gain this high level of trust you need to consider four facts. First the more important and critical the job you are doing to patients the more it takes time to gain trust to the level that your patient begin referring friends and people to you. If you perform an easy job like a backer you will get referrals from your clients in few days. Second, how well are you in providing awareness and educating your patient about your business and the procedures you perform to him. I you are good at educating your patients you immediately create high level connections. Third, The help you provide the patient that gives him progress in his life through your services that enabled it. Fourth, the time you spend knowing and learning about your patient, his problems and needs. The more you spend time listening to patients the more you create deep relationships and the more you create valuable connections who grow your network and profitability.