How to Shift Patient Communication Due to COVID-19
Businesses around the world are learning to adjust significant parts of how they communicate with their patients. Practices need to be sensitive to emerging concerns and emphasize how they are attempting to address questions around safety.
Consider how you are altering your operations and what your customers need to know about the changes to your business. Right now, what are the most frequently asked questions patients ask you related to your dental practice? From there, you can work on specific messaging to address those questions including how you are altering the way you serve patients.
Developing Messaging
Select a person within (or outside your organization such as a professional marketer) to create communication on how your practice will treat patients moving forward. Once that communication is in writing, your team needs to see what the company will be saying to customers so staff can stay on the same page when interacting with patients.
For external communication, this process will also include the channels to share your practice updates.
Planning Your Dental Practice's Communication Strategy
When a current or prospective patient is considering booking an appointment there are multiple paths where they discover (or rediscover) your brand. This includes:
-Google
-Social media
-Emails
-Ads
-Your website
Each of these channels can communicate how your practice is moving forward and serving its patients. However, the information that’s most immediately relevant to each can be different.
For example, let’s start with GoogleMyBusiness. The listing includes your practice’s hours which may have shifted due to the pandemic. When someone’s searching on Google for a dental clinic near them that’s open right at that moment due to an emergency, you can help them by updating your office hours if they have since shifted.
Did you know you can also add posts that are visible with your listing to provide specific COVID-19 updates? To do so, log into business.google.com and select “Posts” to create an update.
A day after air travel between the US and Europe was banned, Spirit Airlines sent out a promotional email with the subject line of “Never A Better Time To Fly”. If you have any scheduled social media posts, emails, and advertisements, review those to make sure they are still appropriate.
For specific new content you can share socially, let your followers know when you will be open and the precautions you are taking to serve them and take care of your staff.
Most digital marketing strategies seek to shepherd readers back to their website. Given that, your website can be the central point for COVID-19 updates. For our dental implants clinics’ website, we include a link to COVID-19 updates on the top of our home page.
Our COVID-19 update page shares how we’re incorporating guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and the American Dental Association.
Here we cover:
- Social distancing guidelines we have in place both within the waiting areas and treatment rooms.
- Personal protective equipment we supply to both patients and staff.
- Next steps patients can take if they need to reschedule due to illness.
Since the pandemic is fluid, you can also acknowledge the situation’s constantly changing and specify the date where you made any recent updates to your practice’s policies related to COVID-19.
Listening to Your Patients
Being proactive and responsive will be more important than ever as patients are dealing with all sorts of stresses and anxieties. Along with monitoring your response times for phone calls and emails, you can ensure a team member’s tasked with monitoring review and social media websites including Facebook, Google, and Yelp for feedback.
Your review response guidelines may include:
- Greeting the reviewer by name
- Acknowledging the person's issue and why they may be upset
- Providing an explanation if there is a reason that may have caused the issue
- Giving them a path to attempt to resolve the issue and opportunity to connect offline for further communication
Ultimately updating your communication strategy helps protect anyone entering your clinic and the practice’s reputation. By closely monitoring how your patients feel and react to your content, you can further refine how you’re serving customers. That way, you can provide further updates across digital channels.