Consumer Profiling in an Optometric Practice

Therefore, for an Optometry Practice to experience massive success and exponential growth sales, all three aspects of Optometry need to function efficiently and cohesively together.

The above means an Optometry Practice owner needs to know and understand when each of these areas are at play in his or her practice at any given time of the day.

With the ever changing economic climate in the world, many Optometric Practices find it continuously difficult to maintain the level of success attained in the past, let alone grow their businesses year after year

For all these years Optometrists have been referring to the people that come to their practices as “Patients.” However, that is not necessarily the case.

The three distinct areas of Optometry outline that there is an educational, health and retail component in Optometry. That then explains that in fact the people coming to practices should be referred to as “Consumers.”

Within consumers, there are patients, customers and clients.

Patient: The person that has an eye problem that they need to be solved. They are usually the person that comes to the practice for the 1st time or is referred by a health care professional. They currently don’t have any visual correction.

Customer: The person that currently wears a prescription; knows that they need visual correction or what they problem is but they are not necessarily the person that has been to that particular store before. Not loyal to a practice as yet and may need an upgrade on their current correction.

Client: The person that keeps coming back to the same practice year after year for all their visual requirements and management options.

Consumer profiling in an Optometry practice is important in that it enables the staff to know what type of individual they interact with at any given point of time. This is critical in them knowing what type of expectations consumers have and most importantly what management solutions are available.

Consumer Expectations in an Optometry Practice

Conclusion

Consumer profiling is critical for the following reasons:

Practices can now be able to identify how to interact with the respective consumer who usually falls in the criteria: “Please make sure I get what I need to see better, but make sure it fits in my medical aid benefits.”

Owners can now be able to train their staff on how to identify the different consumers and how to profile each type.

Staff can now effectively and efficiently be able to interact with the different consumers with ease and more appropriately.

Service delivery will begin to improve further as productivity levels will now increase as a result of adequate consumer profiling.

Practices can now identify different easy –to-use techniques for consumer profiling such as have stickers of different colours to place on files for identity purposes. It will simplify the process.