Regularly, The Campbell Academy surveys its patient group.
We started this process some years ago by making sure that we asked for consent to use people's emails and then made sure that we asked for that consent every single time patients came into the practice.
That gave us thousands of email contacts that we're able to use to ask questions about how we're doing and also to send a monthly communication and newsletter from me, just about the shape of dentistry and what it's like and the challenges that we have.
When we survey the guys, we ask them a series of questions, and that's analysed by Kath, who's our head of research at the clinic here, and then on Slack (our communication channel), Kath teased out the early results of the survey the other day.
Obviously, that's something that I'm particularly interested in, but there have been a few more questions added this year just to gain a little bit more information, and one of those is around reputation.
It turns out that of the people that answer the survey (and the response rate is relatively low as these surveys are, but there are still hundreds and hundreds of people in the response). Reputation is the most important thing to bring people to our clinic.
Bearing in mind that when you give a survey like this out, people who are dissatisfied are obviously motivated to complete it, the results around the reputation and stuff are extraordinary to us.
It's another example of how easy it is to become an overnight success in 30 years.
It's also another example of the importance of setting the why of your business and the values of your business, and understanding that the thing about the long-term is that it takes a long time.
The final thing to understand about reputation, though, is that it is so difficult to achieve the momentum of reputation over decades, and yet so easy to lose it in an instant. What then happens is that the culture of your business is designed to protect the reputation that you have developed, and then the reputation continues to grow. It's not easy, this ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, but in a world where you have to shout unimaginably loud to get attention, it's perhaps one of the only ways you can build something that's worthwhile for the long term.
Blog Post Number - 4524
Leave a comment