Question
How can counseling elevate the patient experience?
Answer
Jackie Phillips, AuD: Counseling boosts confidence and builds trust. It can help your patients feel that you’re the right professional to help them. Using the latest and most advanced technologies demonstrates that you take your patients and their challenges seriously. Listening to your patients’ specific needs and basing your diagnostics around them is an effective way to build connections. Counseling also helps patients become confident that amplification will improve their lives.
Jeanette Fitzke, AuD: Counseling creates the opportunity to discuss expectations from the beginning of the appointment.
An important part of counseling is discussing and aligning expectations. And, it’s important that patients understand what to expect upfront rather than at the tail end of the counseling process. Conduct all the assessments required for a professional counseling process to uncover any unknowns early in the process. Discussing expectations early on means your patients will understand their amplification and hearing aid choices and be happier with them in the end.
Don Kim, AuD: Counseling―that personalized attention―ensures that your patients will return to you. You know that working with patients to fine tune their hearing aids to suit their preferences and lifestyle is part of every successful fitting. Make sure they know it too – and that they understand that returning to your clinic for adjustments is not only allowed, but strongly encouraged. But what if they don’t buy a hearing aid on the first visit? Establishing loyalty and trust through counseling and a personalized experience with the professional helps to anchor your patient to your clinic and makes it more likely that the customers will return to your shop, even if you do not make the sale on the first visit.
This Ask the Expert is an excerpt from the interview, Rethink Audiology: Delivering Personalized Care In the Age of Over-the-Counter Solutions.
