Detractor Management

You can’t expect to receive perfect 10s on your NPS® surveys. Because of this, you should have a plan to handle detractors. As a refresher, detractors(those who score 6 or lower), are unhappy patients who may communicate their dissatisfaction to their friends and family members and are more likely to drop out of care early. Potentially, these patients can provide valuable insight into what should be improved at your clinic. 

Because of this, we highly recommend following up with detractors. The goal of detractor outreach is to gather additional information about their experience and identify specific reasons for their low score submission. This data can be used to pinpoint problem areas, and adjust your clinical and operational workflows as needed. Additionally, outreach like this may also help prevent early dropouts.

This document provides a possible workflow for handling detractors, starting when you receive a detractor alert.

1. When a patient submits a score between 0 and 6, a Detractor Alert is triggered. This alert is sent to the WebPT Admins for your clinic via email.
2. Navigate to the Reach Standard dashboard and locate the patient who submitted the score.
3. Click the patient’s name to open the patient details page. In the Recent Communications section, review any comments that they left along with their score, then copy their email address. 
4. Next, draft an email. Consider if you want this email to come from the patient’s therapist, the clinic owner/manager, or someone else. Because the purpose is to get a response, you do not want to use a no-reply address. We’ve included sample content below. 
5. When comfortable with your message, send out the email. You may want to consider documenting detractor outreach, ensuring that others in your clinic know that someone has already reached out to this individual. 
6. Alternatively, you could call the patient to gain a better understanding of their experience and the additional reasons for submitting their low score. It's important to listen actively, not become defensive, and to ensure that your patient feels heard.
7. We do not recommend following up with patients who do not respond to the initial request for additional information.