I spoke with Tom a clinic owner last week that I’ve been mentoring for the past 2 years. We grew his revenue from $1.3 million to $1.7 million in the last 18 months.

Tom thought he had a marketing problem like most clients who hire me. The truth is most clinic owners don’t have a marketing problem but a people, training, and process problem.

They think in order grow their clinic they have to improve their healthcare marketing so they hire marketing agencies and consultants to come in. They spend a lot of money on advertising only to get poor results or lose it all.

Even if the marketing agency or consultant is really good. There is not much they can do if your front desk is not trained on how to maximize the number appointments on the phone. How to handle patient objections so they don’t call your competitor instead.

Then once you get the appointment is your patient experience great so they keep coming back and refer their friends, co-workers, and family to you?  And even give you a google review.

I told Tom before you even think about marketing you first need to get really good with clinic operations so you get the highest ROI possible from your marketing. Otherwise, you just speed up the rate at which your community finds you’re not good.

He was struggling to train new employees for his front desk. So I told him about the unusual employee onboarding process I use to train new employees fast so they can start producing right away. Not only that it’s the key to retaining talented and loyal employees. I wish someone told me this a decade ago when I was making all kinds of costly onboarding mistakes at my clinics.

Plus I’m going to give you a simple strategy to accelerate training even more that 99% of clinic owners don’t even know about.

More about that in a second.

Hiring front desk for your clinic is not easy. It doesn’t pay that well and you’re asking them to do a lot like checking patients in, dealing with insurance companies, book patients, back and forth of appointment bookings and reschedulings, and much more.  

Then once you think you found the right one how do you train them as fast as possible to ensure they are successful at your clinic? Especially Millennials who seem to have one foot in and one foot out of the door.

The key is to have a proven onboarding and mentorship process.

Here’s what we do at CallHero. We recently hired Julian who is 25 and super talented. He cost me $10k in recruiting fees!

Here is a picture of him my Instagram account where you can see me live helping clinic owners across the world. 

According to the Deloitte 2018 Millennial Survey, 1 in 4 millennials would quit their job for a better or different offer.

The secret to retaining loyal employees (both front desk and clinicians) is to double down on your employee onboarding and mentorship process.

Here is what we did with Julian (who is a millennial)

1.) We set the onboarding agenda for the next 2 weeks so they know exactly what to expect and who is going to help them. Also if they have any questions they know who to talk too.  We give him a copy of this and we review it every day. 

2.) We first start our new employees on Thursday because that’s when we are least busy. This allows us to spend more time getting to know him personally and build rapport. The first day we provide an experience he’ll never forget and no other company offers.

3.)  Once he arrived we gave him a CallHero Birthday present which includes a welcome package of balloons, expensive wine, 5-minute journal, branded T-shirt, and my favourite marketing book Expert Secrets.

4.) Then we took him out to his favourite restaurant for a delicious dinner to celebrate his CallHero birthday. He loves Greek food :)

We do all this before we even start training him. Our goal is to build rapport and get to know him personally. Once we achieved that we begin the training so his transition is quick and smooth.

5.) Next, we start with culture training and alignment with our 1-page strategic plan.

6.) Then we talked about his personal bucket list and how CallHero’s Bucket List Program will help him make his dreams possible.  His bucket list is to go backcountry snowboarding by a snowmobile and the plan is for Alan (my business partner) and I will do the bucket list with him.  

7.) We set the expectations on responsibilities and targets. What meetings he must attend weekly & monthly and how we measure success every week.

8.) After that, we begin business and systems training. Our employees must know our business inside and out.

9.) And last we role play over and over again.

For example, you can use CallHero’s call tracking and phone call analytics to see what the front desk needs to improve on. You can listen in on good and bad calls to give feedback. If you see something they’re not doing quite right you just roleplay it over and over again until it sticks.

And then we use this simple strategy to accelerate training even more. It’s called the Cookie Oreo Approach to constructive criticism during your employee onboarding process. It’s how you provide feedback in a way that causes them to love you instead of hate you.

It works like this. You first sandwich two positive and honest statements in between your constructive criticism.

For example.

Cookie Layer 1:

Hi Alice, I really like how you handled that last call when the customer asked about price. Great job on handling that objection. That was perfect.

Filling Layer:

I noticed earlier this morning when you were on the phone. The patient said I’ll call you back and you said ok and hung up.

From now on. In this situation I want you to say, “I really recommend you see {Clinician's name]. He’s really good with [Patient Injury], [First Name]. We have tomorrow at 9 AM or Thursday at 2 PM available. Which of these appointments would work for you and we can get you booked in today.”

Cookie Layer 2:

You’re doing a great job booking appointments over the phone and this will help you book even more appointments so we can help more people in the community. Instead of them ringing our competitor who doesn’t take care of the patient as we do.

Can I count on you to do this?

So when you’re onboarding a new employee provide your constructive criticism this way and you’ll get much better results from them.

That’s the exact onboarding process we use here at CallHero to retain loyal and talented employees. Also, gets them up to speed in the fastest way possible.

If you want to train your front desk to maximize the number of bookings from the same number of calls. I have a FREE guide called “23 Killer Secrets To Booking Even More Patients Over The Phone.”

These phone scripts is what I give to all my clients to help them onboard new front desk as well as train their current ones in the fastest way possible.

Inside you’ll learn:

• The correct way to answer the phone and offer help

• How to effectively put people on hold so they don't hang up and ring your competition

• What to say to get patients to commit to appointments so you can always keep your books filled

• The most important words to include and avoid in patient conversations

• How to deal with difficult or defensive patients so you can calm the situation and easily resolve things

And much more.

Click here to get your FREE guide now