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Setting clear chiropractic patient expectations is hard for many business owners. Many people turn to chiropractors to seek instant pain relief, quick mobility improvements, or even a cure for an ongoing issue. While even one session can benefit patients in some cases, there are far more instances where ongoing chiropractic care is required to deliver the type of relief patients are hoping for. The most important thing you can do as a practitioner and business owner is to communicate the value and benefits of your service to a customer. Doing so helps set clearer expectations from day one, so anything you do after the fact serves to support a shared goal.
The Root of the Problem: Misunderstanding
Surprisingly, many patients aren't even fully aware of what a chiropractor does, and they don't ask during their first appointment. Even when the practitioner goes out of their way to be clear about their work, the person's lack of understanding ultimately leads to misinterpretation and unmet expectations.
The relationship between a chiropractor and patient should be educational from the start; it's helpful to build rapport by asking your patient more about what brought them to you, their past experiences with chiropractic care, and their treatment goals.
Taking the time to develop a deeper understanding of each individual helps align goals with patients' chiropractic expectations.
Consider keeping a stock of evidence-based chiropractic education materials. These can help you illustrate concepts to your patients and give them documents to take home with them. The time you spend investing in their education can return in greater loyalty, fewer complaints, and better outcomes.
How to Communicate the Role of Chiropractic Care
Being upfront with your patients ensures they don't develop unrealistic expectations. If they present symptoms that your care isn’t likely to resolve, be honest with them. At the same time, share what spinal readjustment can do and how you’d personally implement a care plan to help them.
Start With the Big Picture
After ensuring your patients understand the scope of your practice, address the whole case from a top-down perspective. It's essential to establish a general care framework based on their age, condition, and symptoms. This helps develop clear SMART chiropractic patient expectations: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Make sure that the patient understands the projected treatment timeline, so they don't expect immediate results or feel disappointed when their problems aren't immediately alleviated.
This helps answer the question of how many chiropractic sessions are needed for relief based on the patient's unique symptomology and medical history. It also helps set clear expectations, establishes a follow-up schedule, and helps patients feel empowered rather than disappointed after their first visit.
Establish a Follow-Up Practice
Patients appreciate emails, text messages or calls between appointments. They also offer an opportunity for them to share any changes to their symptoms post-adjustment that can help you make meaningful changes to care. For example, sending out an email at the end of the day following their first visit can be a great way to offer chiropractic patient education.
Include links to helpful blog posts on your website and PDF handouts, and make sure communication resources are clear. Some chiropractors also like to include a survey to give the patient an easy way to submit feedback.
You can also develop a follow-up schedule with your staff to ensure that patients are sent reminders about their appointment 48 hours beforehand. This can help reduce last-minute cancellations and no-shows, so your practice keeps running smoothly.
Stress the Importance of Ongoing Care
Many patients mistakenly believe that if they feel better, it’s okay to quit treatment. Long-term pain relief requires consistent readjustment of the spine; chiropractors must make it clear to their patients that adjustment is comprehensive and adaptive. Their own lifestyle may need to change to support their long-term relief.
Offer helpful tips on how to change their lifestyle to support their well-being. Remember the treatment goals you established together? Connect your recommendations to these outcomes, which can motivate the patient to comply with your suggestions.
Setting Expectations Before the First Visit
Many patients are unsure what to expect when they visit a chiropractor for the first time. Your practice can get a head start on educating and supporting them by sending a preliminary email before their first visit. After someone makes an appointment, send them a welcome email from your practice featuring a video and helpful resources.
This can make your practice feel more personal and support the patient's retention in the future. Include a list of FAQs, 2-3 blog posts and links to digital paperwork, so they can complete their intake before arrival and get straight into being seen.
Businesses that nurture patients before the first point of contact ultimately have greater success maintaining long-lasting, loyal relationships. By tapping into your patients' potential anxiety or uncertainties, you can help ease fears and promote a sense of confidence and optimism.
Embrace a Fluid Mindset in Your Own Work
Chiropractic care doesn't deliver miracles overnight. It takes many sessions, over the course of weeks or months, to provide long-lasting results for patients. Fluidity is key to maintaining realistic outcomes as both a practitioner and patient. When you embrace the ongoing nature of the work, it's easier to communicate with patients who may express frustration over a lack of progress.
Leave the door open during treatment for change. Let patients know that if symptoms change or emerge, this doesn't mean treatment isn't working. Explain that the nature of chiropractic adjustment embraces change and that adjustments can be made based on how they feel from one session to another.
By keeping an open mind, practitioners can also reduce frustration and discourse with patients. Instead, they can form a more collaborative relationship where they learn from their patients and help them through more personalized adjustments.
Tips for Building a More Responsive Chiropractic Business
Expectations fail when companies don't respond quickly or adequately to patients' needs. To be successful, you need the right tools to support your patients' happiness and well-being. This goes beyond merely offering the right services; it's about cultivating resources that ensure patients always feel supported.
Make Sure Your Website Is Up to Date
An outdated website doesn't just drive business away; it signals a lack of care. People won't feel like your company is there for them if they have to navigate a complicated, slow, or outdated website, or if they build expectations based on inaccurate information. Your website should be more than just a marketing tool; it's a vital resource for new and returning patients to find important information, contact your practice, and learn more about chiropractic care.
Top-performing chiropractic businesses will also integrate a patient portal into their website, where patients can log in, send messages, communicate with staff, and pay bills virtually. This is a significant investment in your website's functionality that helps patients maintain engagement with your business.
Update Your Phone Response System
A HIPAA VoIP service gives your patients top-quality, responsive, on-demand, and always HIPAA-compliant communication. All-inclusive features, like 24/7 support and answering service, ensure your business is always accessible when patients need information.
With expert software, your chiropractic business can handle any volume of calls smoothly, avoid unnecessary waiting times, and incorporate features like call schedules and a queue to prevent dissatisfaction.
Clear, consistent communication is key to building patient trust as a chiropractor. Your business's phone system plays a massive role in that. By leveraging tools like text messaging, call forwarding and redirecting, you empower your staff to provide the level of customer service that keeps patients happy.
Train Staff on Best Practices
Your front desk staff plays a key role in setting and maintaining expectations with patients. You should ensure they are fully educated on your services, the cost of care, billing, and other topics that patients often inquire about. Most importantly, you should establish general rules and best practices for patient communication to ensure your business always projects an aura of care, professionalism, and responsiveness.
Stress Prompt Answering as a Business Asset
Ensure your staff understands the importance of being responsive and establish a general timeframe for returning calls, answering emails, and responding to text messages. Patients who have to wait on hold for long periods of time grow frustrated, and if they are unable to receive a callback or email, they'll feel deliberately ignored. This causes them to lose trust and potentially take their business elsewhere.
Practice Calls and Email Responses
Take time to do mock calls and email training sessions with your staff to ensure that they uphold your business's commitment to quality patient care. Offering real-time feedback can help staff improve their tone, delivery and problem-solving skills. Moreover, having the chiropractor directly offer customer care feedback strengthens your staff's responses when interacting with clients.
Consider developing call scripts for staff to draw inspiration from. These scripts should include a standard greeting and sign-off to keep communication consistent across the board. No matter who a patient interacts with, they should always feel like they receive the same level of respect, empathy, and care.
Make Information Readily Available
One of the most frustrating experiences for a chiropractic patient is explaining the same situation multiple times to different people. They expect the staff to understand them and their needs from the get-go, especially after they've already received care. Ensure that patient information is hosted on HIPAA-compliant software so employees can easily access information, including insurance details and communication history.
You should also have office resources available to help staff answer questions they may not have an immediate answer to. This includes information regarding billing, payment options, pricing, and services.
Clear Expectations Build Lasting Relationships
Chiropractic care isn't a quick fix, but that allows practitioners to build long-term, rewarding relationships with their patients. By putting the right systems and practices in place, you can support people at every stage of their journey. When care is framed as an ongoing process guided by clear goals and open communication, patients are likelier to feel empowered and trust you.
To make this possible, ensure your practice has dependable tools that keep patients connected and informed. A reliable phone system is a big part of that. If you’re looking for a trusted partner, consider PrimeVOX, a business VoIP provider with the right tools to deliver the care patients expect.
