Learn how to use online surveys to find out what would make your patients happier. Use the collected data and improve the quality of service in your healthcare facility.
Who is this article useful for?
Perhaps every clinic, medical center or hospital puts a lot of effort into providing the best possible care for their patients. This often requires financial investment or investment in the form of additional human labor. As everywhere else, efficiency and wise use of available resources are very important in healthcare. The aim is to provide the best service to patients with what you have.
Therefore, it is important to identify where to invest and where to put our efforts to achieve the best results. The client usually knows the best, what would make them happy. So why not ask?
Just as in business, clients in the healthcare sector pass on their experiences to one another. If they are satisfied, they will return to you repeatedly and recommend you to their friends. In other words, they become loyal. Returning clients means stability for you in the future. In the private sector, where clients are more likely to pay for services themselves, this loyalty is essential. It represents the certainty of generating turnover in the future. A more stable entity can afford to invest regularly, knowing that the investment can be recouped over time because the clientele continues to generate sufficient financial resources.
It's a cycle that starts with a satisfied client. In this article, you'll learn how you can use online surveys to find out what specifically your clients would appreciate to make them happier.
It is always better to plan your survey and define the goals before you begin to create concrete questions. Here are a few things to consider before creating your questionnaire.
There are two basic options. Either you will conduct your survey as a one-off or you will conduct it repeatedly. If you ask your clients on a monthly or quarterly basis - even if you ask them every six months - you will be able to observe:
This way you can check that you are putting your efforts into the right areas.
Define exactly what information you want to get from your respondents. Different types of questions and their text will then depend on this. Let’s go through what you might want to know - how do your clients perceive the following:
According to the concrete functioning of your medical facility, go in more detail in areas you have chosen to investigate. Define what information is important to you specifically so that you can better work on your clients' satisfaction.
How many respondents do you want to send the questionnaire to? All of your clients or just some of them? If only some, which ones will you select? For example, do you want to focus your survey on just one group of your clients? These questions also need to be answered in advance. Depending on your group of respondents, you will then also choose the most appropriate ways to share the survey with them.
Now you know what you want to get out of the survey, you have a plan. It's time to start creating the questions. With Survio you can choose from 19 question types. Pay attention which question type you choose - wrong question type can ruin the validity of collected data. A good example is single choice and multiple choice questions. These two types of questions serve different purposes and are also analyzed differently. For example, if you ask about the most favorite payment method, you cannot use the multiple choice question. People will choose more options and you will never know, which one is the best, the most favorite.
We also recommend reading something about open-ended questions on our blog. These questions are very suitable when you are looking for subjective opinions, attitudes and feelings or very specific vibes from your respondents that they can only express when they can type into an empty text field. However, at the end of the survey you need to go through every single text answer to get the big picture about what your respondents think in general. This is time-consuming and the interpretation can vary depending on the person analyzing the text responses. Therefore, use open-ended questions only if you cannot use the closed-ended ones. If you may lose some information by using a closed-ended question, prefer an open-ended one.
All questions are fully editable, you can add or delete answers, set up a condition of obligatory question, add an image or video, choose the format of the answer (e-mail, number, date, text). The survey builder is super-easy and intuitive - watch the video:
Let’s go through some concrete questions you could use in your own survey. Feel free to copy or even modify them. You can also try our Patient Satisfaction Survey Template and add or edit the questions right away!
Don’t be afraid to use matrix questions. They make your survey shorter and clearer as they group more questions together. The rating scale is also called the Likert scale.
As we have spoken about customer loyalty at the beginning of this article, this is the direct way to find out how loyal your customers/clients really are. A Net Promoter Score is a telling metric that is quite easy to interpret. We have prepared a whole use case dedicated to Net Promoter Score, that is full of practical examples.
Learn from our customer experiences how you and your organization can benefit from using Survio.
How and on which platforms does your clientele most often communicate? Find the best way for them to share your survey and increase your response rate. You can share your survey:
Would you like to collect feedback directly in your medical center? You have a great opportunity to do so. Offer filling out the questionnaire as an activity for patients to do while they wait in the waiting room. Simply provide them with free wi-fi and post a QR code on the wall that takes them directly to the questionnaire.
Monitor results from incoming responses in real-time. Survio generates the results automatically in clear tables and charts. You can filter summary results and also individual answers, change the type of chart and create pivot tables that will help you find connections among your data. Use this analysis to make data-driven decisions to create better medical centers and facilities. Your efforts will not only make your patients happier but also increase the level of healthcare in your region generally.
You can download your results as a report in one click (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, CSV or Google Sheets) get ready to present ascertained data to your colleagues in an instant.
In healthcare, especially in the private sector, similar rules apply as in business when dealing with customers. Satisfied clients will come back to you, become loyal and recommend you to their friends. In this way, your clientele will grow steadily and you will have financial security for current and future investments. Find out how your clients perceive your care and discover what you can do to make them even happier. Now it's up to you, create your own patient satisfaction survey.
