Understanding Patient Insights

One thing we focus on in the optometry practice and the optical showroom is to be able to develop deep patient insights that will help in the marketing activities. The more we understand our patients, the more likely we are to discover what they really value about our practice, the services we offer, and our products. With these in mind, we can know how to communicate with them and build long-lasting relationships. One very important insight is to be able to distinguish between the user, the buyer, and the payer of the product or service.

We should be able to identify the three roles that a patient may have for every product, service, and transaction. The value sought by each patient’s role can be different. The user values the performance, the buyer values the service, and the payer values the price.

Who is the user? The user is the patient who will use the eye drops or wear the contact lenses, the contact lenses products, the eyeglasses, the sunglasses, and sports glasses.

Who is the buyer? The buyer is the patient who makes the buying decision, which contact lenses, which eyeglasses, or which sunglasses to buy.

Who is the payer? The payer is the patient or anyone who pays for the products and services. It could be the patient himself, it could be a third-party payer, or the service could be offered by the practice.

A patient could have any of these roles or the three together. In all cases, identifying the three roles is very important in driving how we market products and services to the patient.

Consider a scenario where a family of three comes to the kid’s appointment and it turned out that he has to replace his eyeglasses. The eyeglasses user is the kid, the eyeglasses buyer could be both parents, and the payer could be the father.

The value sought by each patient role is different:

The kid wants to finish the soonest possible to return home to play video games or meet with friends and show them his new eyeglasses. The parents want to make sure that their son’s eye health is improving and want to get informed about all that is possible to do in order not to wear eyeglasses. The father who is the payer wants to make everything possible to ensure with the money he pays his son gets the best care (this could be paying out of his own pocket or paying for the best health program that provides the best care). Whenever you think about patient insights you need to distinguish between the three roles and how to make each one happy by providing what they value.