“Do you pee your pants when you sneeze?”
This was a question I encountered recently while on hold for a physician’s office. The wording was a bit more formal, I’ll admit, but I wanted to yell, “No, just connect me to a human!” The message was part of an endless string of unappealing symptom descriptions followed by the assurance that the skilled practitioners I was holding for had a solution.
Long hold times filled with promotions for services can damage patient experience
Hold messages that offer obnoxious, looping advertisements aren’t the only annoying marketing technique one sees in healthcare. I’ve seen posters in dental offices showing teeth and gums that might have been borrowed from an episode of The Walking Dead. I’ve encountered waiting room televisions that were the visual equivalent of those annoying hold messages: graphic depictions of symptoms or a medical condition followed by a pitch for services that would solve the problem in question.
Respect Your Captive Audience
I’m sure the origin of the “sneeze-pee” message I encountered was some marketer’s bright idea. If a medical practice has people spending hundreds or thousands of hours on hold each month, that could translate into tens or hundreds of thousands of ad impressions.
The same applies to the waiting room videos - as long as our patients are sitting there, let’s try to generate a little extra revenue.
The best part, from the marketer’s standpoint, is that these impressions, unlike search ads or social media ads, cost next to nothing.
This might be smart marketing if it didn’t also harm patient experience. Nobody likes to be forced to listen to or view a steady stream of irrelevant ads, particularly if they start looping and repeating while the same patient is still waiting.
It’s reminiscent of the scene from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, where the protagonist undergoes “behavior modification” by being forced to watch violent films in a form of aversion therapy.
Marketers should restrain themselves, particularly when dealing with a captive audience that is already having a negative experience by not being served promptly. Interactions with healthcare providers are stressful enough without describing even more conditions and symptoms they might have.
Start with the root cause
The first question to ask is, “Why are people waiting so long that it makes sense to create advertising for them?”
The best experience is no wait time at all. Eliminating wait time completely would likely be prohibitively expensive, but minimizing it should be the objective. If patients (or customers) are on hold long enough to hear a stream of ads start repeating, there’s a staffing or process problem.
In-office waits are usually caused by over-scheduling or time management issues. My own experience has been that medical office waits have improved over the years. I recall physician offices with overflowing waiting rooms and where the stated appointment time was routinely ignored. In recent years, this chaos seems to have been substantially reduced. Still, though, some medical offices use their waiting room screens to broadcast endless promotions for services and products.
Uncertainty is stressful
If you’ve been on hold for a few minutes, you begin to wonder how long the wait will be. Should you hang in there, or hang up and try later? The more time passes, the more salient this internal debate becomes.
There’s a solution that mitigates the uncertainty. Today’s phone systems can often inform callers of their position in queue and/or expected wait time. Some allow the patient to request a callback when it’s their turn, avoiding waiting on hold.
Any steps that reduce hold time duration and/or uncertainty will improve the patient experience. Self-promotional ad impressions will also shrink, but in this case that’s a good thing.
Patient Experience: Low Effort & Stress-free
Practices that want to retain patients and earn high ratings will do their best to make the patient experience low effort and stress-free. One way to do that is exercise restraint in marketing to patients waiting to be served.
Simply put, annoying a patient who is already annoyed puts their loyalty at risk. And while this example focuses on healthcare, marketers of all kinds should pay attention. Medical practices aren’t the only businesses tempted to take advantage of “free” advertising opportunities aimed at captive customers.
