This article is a continuation of “The Key to Effective Marketing: Surveys.” If you haven’t done so yet, we recommend reading the first article to get a better context when reading this one.
Distributing the Survey
Surveys can be done in person, handed to patients to fill out while in the office, done over the phone or done via mail or email. If the survey is done in person or over the phone, ensure that whoever is doing the survey fully understands the questions and why the survey is being done.
Tabulating the Surveys
- If you do not receive an adequate number of responses (enough surveys to see a clear majority in the answers, at minimum 30 responses) by the stated deadline, increase your sampling or extend your deadline. An inadequate response will give you a poor measure of patient trends.
- Collect all survey results and tabulate each question by tallying responses. People’s answers can vary on open-ended questions, in which case you should group similar responses together. An example would be if your survey question said, “Describe the perfect dentist,” If in response to this question 5% of the people surveyed said, “happy,” 5% said, “cheerful,” and 10% said, “always smiling,” these could all be grouped together in one category as they are all a similar response.
- Once you have the raw data of people’s responses tallied, change these tallies into percents based on the total number of surveys done.
- Ensure that you promptly respond to any requests for a personal response.
- At a staff meeting, discuss the areas of the practice that are indicated to be in need of change.
The information gathered from doing the above is extremely valuable in deciding what you provide and how you promote and present that.
Questions or Comments?