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Welcome to the show. This is Dr. Eric Kowalke with Look to the Children. Thanks to ChiroSecure and Dr. Stu Hoffman for hosting this show every month. Uh, we’re here with the whiteboard again. Um, May I think it is 20, 21. What month are we in? I host the first Thursday of every month show Dr. Monika Buerger does the third Thursday of every month. Uh, and that’s super awesome as well. So please tune into that. Uh, you’re going to get some real practical stuff. I love to bring some stuff to this quick 10 to 20 minute show that you can take back and use in your practice right away today. We’re talking about converting kids to care plans, and there’s three main things we focus on in our office, um, which were high volume pediatric clinic in grand Rapids, Michigan, look up our testimonials, Google our office, higher health care practicum, grand Rapids, uh, Wyoming, Michigan, uh, we see 1500 plus people a week and tons of new kids. 40% of that is pediatrics. Um, and so we’re going to go through the three keys for us, uh, on converting kids to care plans. And this is, uh, parents bringing kids in that have some issue and or parents having an issue. And now we’re getting their whole family and their kids under care as well. And so we’re gonna just get right at it today. Number one,
Trust.
There’s no way any parent will ever bring you their kids if they don’t trust you. So they have to trust that you’re going to help that, uh, they have a hope that it’s going to get better and that you’re the guy that to make it happen or gal, uh, how do you develop trust? Let’s talk about new patients developing trust with them. They’re sitting at home. Mom, sitting at home. Kid has an ear infection. She’s Google searching what to do, uh, currently says, try chiropractic. So should Google searches chiropractor near me, goes to your website, sees as you see kids sees a testimonial about ear infections like, Oh man, maybe I’m going to check them out. Or she posts to a thread. They may know a chiropractor that can help with kids. Somebody responds with your office. They need to go to an easy place to schedule.
So in our office you can click right on it. They go to schedule the key to this. As you need to make it easy, you need to be looking at all the steps it takes for a mom when she gets to that point all the way through the getting on your calendar. So you need to be using a software system that connects with your schedule. So when that mom wants to book the appointment, she can actually select the time this isn’t a, I want to request a time or say that I’m interested and now you have to respond back to me from the office. I have to respond back to them. It takes multiple forms of communication for us to confirm them maybe by email. Uh, and then I get paperwork sent to me, or I got to print it off and fill it out and bring it in your, your conversion.
Going to be very low, just to get people into the office. Cause you just develop all these hurdles, create all these hurdles for the parent, um, or the mom to get to you. So if it syncs with your EHR system, we use skid for that. It knows, Hey, here’s the time that’s going to work. 10 30 on Monday, boom, mom books. It, we already know it works with our office. The appointments made now we’re confirming it. So they should get an immediate email or text message after they make that appointment from you explaining your mission. Hi, I’m Dr. Quirky with higher health chiropractic. We love seeing kids and families in our office. It’s our passion to help families and kids realize the true potential that their body has to heal itself and unlock that ability to heal from the inside out, no matter what condition it is we’re looking at, where is the interference of the nervous system?
Because we know the nervous system controls every other function of the body and our job is to find it, locate it and remove the interference. So the body can heal itself naturally the way it was intended. And we’re excited for you to come into the office. We can’t wait to see you and help you. Something like that. Uh, just randomly made that up, but you do a video hosted on Vimeo or YouTube or something like that and embed it into your software. So skin does all this for us. As soon as they book an appointment, boom, it goes out. If you don’t have a sewer system like that, you can manually do it. Soon as you see a new patient, create the email and attach it and send it off. Uh, you just can’t keep up with a lot of it if you’re doing it manually, but you could totally do it.
That goes out right when they make an appointment. And then the number one thing you want to do is make sure that they don’t forget. Like if you added up all the people last year that said, Oh, I forgot my appointment time. Or I couldn’t remember when my appointment was, there’s a lot of money that was left on the table just for your own office because people couldn’t remember when to come in. And ultimately more importantly, they’re not getting the results because they’re not sticking to the recommendations and they’re not getting the true value of what you’re bringing to the table with this, which is principal chiropractic care. So appointment reminders are super important. They have to go out ours, go out 24 hours before two hours before they sync their calendar system. So Google, uh, I Cal, um, what’s the other one? Microsoft, uh, outlook. So there’s no excuse that they know the appointment is there. They’re not forgetting it. Their paperwork’s already filled out. We reduce the number of steps. You should try to get it down to six steps or less. And it is whole time. You’re there looking at your Google reviews. So biggest one of trust here is reviews. Look at our office. We have over 400 reviews. People trust us right when they come in because they read all these reviews. Um, number two is testimonial,
Which you read
Reviews and testimonials go hand in hand because it’s basically the same thing. So if you don’t have a lot of reviews, you’ve got to get testimonials on your website somewhere else from practice members or patients and lead people to there. As soon as you have enough reviews, basically they go to Google. They add testimonials at your office. So that’s number one. Okay.
We’re to see if I have enough lines here, trans pair, and looking at that, I, it
Transparency be transparent. They don’t know what they’re coming into. I mean, they’re, they’re thinking worst case scenario. Um, you know, they’re going into a scary place. Their kid might get hurt, but they’re willing to do whatever it takes for them to get better. You know, they don’t know if there’s going to be like the 1980s de core in that place. Uh, if instead it cost them $500. If they’re going to need all this stuff, are they going to get, you don’t know what, like worst case scenario. They’re probably thinking that’s what the experience is going to be. Maybe the kids get like, who knows what? So you gotta be transparent as possible on what are they getting into? Like how long is it going to take, what’s it going to cost? How many visits do they need to get? Are they going to need to come to the office?
Um, if you can show them what the office looks like through a video tutorial before they even come into your office, I’ll let them talk to whoever they’re going to see in their first visit. So if your front desk CA is the one that’s going to see them, ours is Maria. Maria would call them or do a film, a video quick with an iPhone, you know, with the office behind saying, hi, I’m Maria. I can’t wait to see you tomorrow. I’m going to be the one at the front desk. When you come in, we’re going to have everything ready for you. Uh, your appointment time is going to be 30 to 45 minutes on your first visit. The goal of this is to collect as much objective information as possible. So we do in specific assessments or reviewing your health history. So the doctor has a really good idea of what’s going on to see if you’re a good fit.
And if we’re a good fit, to be able to help you get to your health goals. And from that point forward, we’ll be able to decide and know, you know what? The next steps are, something like that. I randomly made that up, but it’s from your front desk. CA what are the important things they need to know? They get that video 24 hours before. So now they trust you a little bit more like, wow, this is the person, the dress nice they’re professional. The office is bright. Clean, looks like a place I’d want to go to. All of those things are developing trust, breaking down barriers before they even come into the office and allowing you to be transparent on what they’re actually getting themselves into, um, before they even come into your office.
And, uh, this one, yeah,
I have one too many. So trust is number one through reviews, testimonials transparency is number two, and then you need to manage their time.
So you need to be efficient with their time and that’s efficiency in the office and efficiency outside of the office. So let me give you both scenarios inside the office. If they have to wait for 45 minutes, every time they come in, or they have to wait for 15 minutes, I mean, you sit in the waiting room for 15 minutes. When you thought you were going to be seen in today’s day and age, that’s a long time and people just don’t like it. So your schedule has to be really efficient. You have to, you can’t get behind every single day. By 20, 30 minutes, you got to try to get people in within, you know, our goal is to get them in and out of the office at 15 to 20 minutes. From the time they walk in to the time they walk out, we’re pretty darn close to that.
Even with the volume of people we see, and we just train on it, we really specifically, how do we schedule, how do we move people around, um, in SCAD and allows people to reschedule appointments. It shows them times that are busy and times that aren’t busy. So we don’t end up with times anymore where three o’clock is insane. And there’s nobody at three 15 because they see that three 15 is less busy so they can easily move themselves. And it balances out your schedule. It makes it more efficient, allows us to see more people, but feel like we’re not working as hard to do that. Um, and that’s through scheduling software. And so inside the office, you got to respect their time, their first visit, you have to give them accurate. You know, this is going to be 45 to 60 minutes or 30 to 45 minutes.
Stick to that. Do whatever you gotta do to keep that accurate. The second one with time is outside of the office. I mentioned. So what does that mean? Well, if the person’s coming three times a week and they’re trying to manage those appointments, my life, we have six kids. If I had to schedule three appointments a week, the chances of me sticking to that schedule exactly is nil to none because stuff comes up, you know, there’s birthday stuff though, kids events, there’s just so much going on. I’m going to have to change those appointments. So if it’s on me to call you at a time, that works for me, that I know that you’re also open to reschedule the appointment. That’s inconvenient. And that is consuming my time. Just for me to be able to come into your office because you gotta think about this.
It’s like, Oh yeah, they could call me, but you’re mostly, you’re only open 20 hours a week for adjusting. So that means they only have 20 hours a week that they can call you. So they’ve got to look at their schedule. They got to look at your schedule and they got to find times that work to call you. And then if you’re busy or you can’t answer the phone, now it’s super inconvenient. And then I got to take the time to figure out what, when a new time will work and get that rescheduled, it’s a hassle. It’s not convenient for me. I don’t like to do it, which is why people no call no show, or they’re just like I can’t do at the time. The time commitment is too much for me to even manage the appointment, scheduling for my kids. This is where this is so important to converting and getting people to stick with.
This is they have to be easy to reschedule and schedule appointments, use a software out there that allows them to schedule, reschedule through an app on their phone. It makes it super easy and syncs with your EHR system to respect parents times and make it easy and convenient to come into your office. It’s gotta be easy, convenient. So time is the third one for converting. Uh, the fourth one, which I don’t have on here would be be you, you know, try not to be so structured in everything. You’ve got to have a personality. You gotta be a real person. You got to empathize with people like understand where they’re coming from. So it helps if you have kids and you’re converting kids. Cause you can understand what it feels like to be a parent with a kid that has your infections. And they’re up all night long and you’re not sleeping.
You’re like, you know, when I was there, if you, if you’re not a parent, then you just have to relay what it feels like. You know, I know what it feels like. I’ve seen a lot of parents go through this same thing and you’re not alone. We’re here to help you. We’ve seen kids in the same scenario, you’re in the right place. We’re going to figure out what’s going on and we’re going to give you the best care possible. You gotta provide hope on that first visit. Um, and allow that parent to know like, Oh my gosh, this is a solution that, that I can get under. And then, and then the last one is you gotta be so objective and ahead of the game for your recommendations. So you gotta be the doctor, doctor like Fred barge used to say and give them recommendations from a point of objectivity.
Like even if you have a care plan built off for three months and whatever those three times a week and twice a week, and however it works out, don’t just assume that that’s just how it’s going to go. And you don’t have to do anything else with the recommendations. You know, if it’s Wednesday and I know I’m seeing them on Friday and this could be their third visit and that kid’s coming in Wednesday, I will specifically address, Hey, this is what I saw today. What I adjusted on Mondays doing really good. This is what I worked on the way today. I can’t wait to see them on Friday. See all that’s holding and continue to make progress on removing your reference and allow their body to heal itself. I look forward to seeing you guys on Friday. Now you just built value on why Fridays employment is really important because you’re going to review what you just did today.
And then you’re going to make further progress to get them to their goal. They will show up and, and continue to come the recommended visits and get better through your specific targeted table. Talk to address all that stuff. So converting kids is one trust, develop trust for that process. Connect with them, get your videos out there, make the phone calls, do what you gotta do to develop trust before they come in with testimonials and automated reviews. If you’ve got a software like skid to do it, if you want to know what we do in our office, go ahead and reach out to us. We’ll be happy to help you, uh, be transparent if you, if your team or you as always feeling like, uh, I, I, they’re not going to be able to afford it, or I’m going to feel like I’m going to get an objection here, get on the front, end of all those objections and be transparent and address the elephant in the room as much as possible.
And this is how it works in our office. This is your fees could range from here to here, make it as comfortable and easy for them as possible to get care. And then time respect their time in the office and outside the office with scheduling and, um, appropriate time in the office efficiently to get in and out so they can come frequently. And you know, it not be a huge burden to their office. So hope you got something out of this. Look forward to this every month with you guys and giving you just little tidbits on how to be better and how to be more efficient and see more kids, um, and ultimately help them get better and achieve better health. Don’t miss Dr. Monika show two weeks from now on the third Thursday of may. Uh, same time, 1:00 PM Eastern noon central time. Again, my name is Dr. Erik Kowalke. Thank you, ChiroSecure that there’s Stu Hoffman for all you do for this profession. And, uh, we look forward to seeing you guys again in June
Today’s Pediatric show children was brought to you by ChiroSecure.