The Underlying Laws of Persuasive Communication
To a significant degree, your patients base their degree of satisfaction on the demonstrated communication skills by you and your staff. Time and again, our surveys have revealed this. This is especially true to primary care and medical specialists. However, even surgeons enhance their reputations by displaying superb communication skills.
The Communication Formula
There is a Communications Formula. Few marketers know this, although some of the better ones apply it by instinct or accident. It is a formula as powerful, predictable and clear as Newton’s Law of Gravity. It is simply this: Communication is equal to understanding. You cannot have one without the other. Ideal communication entails transferring an idea from one person to another in such a way that the originator's idea is completely understood by the receiver.
Can poor communication destroy patient retention?
Communication and understanding are not absolutes. This means you cannot achieve perfect understanding and communication. Thus, the goal of marketing communications is to achieve the closest you can to perfect communication, as the closer you come to attaining ideal communication, the more effective results you will achieve.
To reach this goal, you must dissect communication and understanding down to their basic components. These are agreement and affinity. Agreement is what is real to an individual based on his viewpoint, experiences, and values. Here is an example of how your medical office could violate agreement and ruin a relationship with a patient.
A patient rushes from her place of employment to get to her doctor's office. She manages to arrive five minutes early, signs in and the receptionist asks her to have a seat. Ten minutes later, she approaches the receptionist to ask how much longer she will have to
wait and explains she will soon need to return to work. The receptionist apathetically replies it should be no more than a few more minutes. The patient waits another twenty minutes and the staff ignores her. Thus, she becomes annoyed and walks out. When she arrives back at her office, she complains to her coworkers about her negative experience.
Affinity is the degree of liking, interest, and desire, or degree of willingness to be close to someone or something. Affinity is synonymous with emotion. Notice in the above example, the patient was in disagreement with the way she was treated. As a result of being ignored, her affinity dropped and she decided to distance herself from that practice. She never again communicated with that medical office.
Crucial Laws of Communication
The greater the level of agreement, the greater the level of affinity. Conversely, the lower the level of agreement, the lower the level of affinity. Therefore, the greater the level of agreement and affinity, the higher the level of communication and understanding. THIS IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT POINT IN ALL COMMUNICATIONS. Why? Because all you need to do is ensure your patients with your communications and actions. If they do, you will automatically raise their affinity, communication, and understanding. Thus, you will boost your patient satisfaction, improve retention, increase patient satisfaction, and will strengthen your reputation.
So, how do you know that your target market will be in agreement with your message? You need to comprehend exactly how they think. If you have any uncertainties about their viewpoints, you will need to conduct surveys. If you want to know what questions to ask, contact us. When we work with clients, we work to ensure you and your staff always demonstrate excellent communication skills. Thus, we can promote this heavily and make promises in this regard that your competitors would likely not be able to match without obviously lying.