There is a reason why Tom Hindhaugh APAM sits new graduates at his private practice down to talk about building high-quality, trusting relationships with clients—and it has a direct impact on clinical outcomes.

Tom believes that creating great relationships with clients makes for a better customer experience or, as Tom likes to put it, ‘We need to give them what they need before we can give them what they want’.

As he shared his insights at the recent FOCUS 2022 conference in a session on how to run a successful physiotherapy practice, Tom’s focus was firmly on the client experience and on why it is so fundamentally important for the health of any business.

The practice director and senior physiotherapist at Back In Motion in Bayswater, Melbourne, says that if you get the client experience wrong, the ramifications can be catastrophic.

‘It’s important to me that everyone in our practice understands that they are involved in the management of all our patients,’ Tom says.

‘If we miss one of these touchpoints along the way, or if I’m not aware that they’ve missed a touchpoint, then we might have ruined this client relationship.

‘So what are the critical things we must do at each touchpoint? We must include all staff members in the practice, not just the treating practitioners.

'And you must understand that this journey starts before clients enter your practice. It begins with their experience of finding you and deciding to contact you.’

Other vital touchpoints for clients include greeting and processing them courteously after they arrive at the practice and making sure that practitioners show they care and actively demonstrate that they are capable of delivering what they say they can for the client.

Getting the client experience right, Tom says, can then feed into clinical outcomes in a very positive way.

‘The client experience actually drives the outcomes; there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that being positive and having a good relationship with your therapist makes a significant difference.

'If a patient is happy with their experience and they trust you, they are more likely to come back. They will do what you ask them to do, they will be more compliant with their rehabilitation and they will be in the right frame of mind for recovery.

‘Without a good experience—well, they’re not coming back. You can’t get clinical outcomes without a keen focus on the patient experience and the satisfaction the client gets from that.

'In essence, if they expect to get better, then they probably will.’

As someone who has employed many physiotherapists over the 25 years he’s been in private practice, Tom says he uses the visit average metric for private paying clients as an indicator of how well the business is managing the client experience.

Extracting the compensables and third-party-paying clients from the equation offers a clear picture of what Tom calls the ‘early self-discharge’ clients, those who present for one or two sessions but then do not make it back for a third appointment.

‘This metric can highlight practitioners who might be highly skilled but who aren’t able to develop a connection with their patients.

'If that’s the case, it means we need to work on why it is that these patients are dropping out early,’ Tom says.

‘In our practice, we looked at whether a practitioner or the practice overall goes over 30 per cent—if 30 per cent of clients or more are not making it to their third appointment, that sets alarm bells off.

'If client retention (patient visit average) drops under five or four, that’s also setting off alarm bells.

'It means that clients are not getting value; they’re not completing their client journey or achieving their goals. And if they’re not happy, they don’t come back. We need to be able to understand why that happens and who it is happening to.’

Getting the client experience just right is perhaps one of the best marketing tools you could employ at your practice, Tom says.

‘If you have clients who are thrilled with the experience, irrespective of the outcome, they’re going to refer their friends and family and reward you by coming back and giving you five-star reviews.

'Those five-star reviews don’t come just from outcomes; they come from the experience that they have with you.’