Your audiologists and other staff members should have strong communication skills and the ability to make customers feel informed, comfortable, and relaxed. And, once you establish a diagnosis, you must explain it to the customer in easy-to-understand terms – not in complex industry jargon. 

Coming to a hearing clinic can be frightening and overwhelming for many people, particularly if they receive a diagnosis of hearing loss or other problems. Always be personable, friendly, and reassuring.

Explain what you’re doing throughout the examination, what your findings reveal, and what the diagnosis means. Clearly discuss the options, such as the hearing aid choices to help with hearing loss. And offer choices at a variety of price points – don’t make assumptions about what your customer can (or can’t) afford.

Tell each customer which hearing aid options would be the best – and why you’re recommending them – in a way they can clearly understand. 

Once they select a hearing aid, discuss the care and maintenance, including cleaning and storing the device, taking care not to overwhelm them with instructions. 

Build positive relationships with each customer where they can understand and trust you. And keep the lines of communication open by providing your contact details and sending invitations for follow-up meetings.

Many hearing clinics work with outdated or disconnected systems, meaning that data often needs to be entered multiple times, which is time-consuming and error prone. Also, antiquated systems rarely offer the most effective, efficient ways to complete important tasks. 

It’s much smarter to use integrated, intuitive systems where you’ll only need to enter data once, reducing redundancies and errors. These solutions make tasks faster, easier, more accurate, efficient, and productive. 

Hearing clinics around the world use Auditdata’s cohesive solutions, including Manage, our Practice Management Software (PMS), Measure, our portfolio of audiological equipment and software, Engage, a portable screening tool for lead generation, and Bridge, an online Noah integration. 

This complete portfolio of solutions makes it easier, faster, and more accurate for audiology professionals to do their jobs.

Since it’s hard to make important business decisions in a vacuum, use the data obtained through reports to make more informed decisions that will drive better outcomes. These analytics are critical to your organization’s success.

Reports are essential for audiology clinics, helping their managers gain valuable insights, increase efficiency, reduce errors, optimize operations, benchmark performance, and improve outcomes. Additionally, reports provide essential information about sales trends and key performance indicators, including sales numbers, hearing aid trials and returns, and so much more.

Rely on intuitive tools like Auditdata Discover, an analytics platform that makes your business transparent by providing metrics that empower you to make fact-based decisions. 

It’s essential that all audiologists follow proper protocols or workflows, which include performing the right steps in the correct order during each examination. While chatting with customers is important to build rapport, some audiologists may spend an inordinate amount of time making small talk or get distracted by customers’ many questions or off-topic conversations.

Implement automated clinical workflows to help ensure efficiency and consistently high quality across your clinics. 

Automatic clinical workflows allow clinic owners, managers, and heads of audiology to track whether best practice standards are consistently being followed – and make improvements when they spot non-compliance.  

Schedule optimization is key to your organization’s success. The right solution allows you to utilize your resources wisely and keep things running smoothly and efficiently. It’s wise to use a solution that offers effective, accurate, user-friendly appointment scheduling. 

Say you need to book a customer for a hearing test. You’d likely need to book:

• an audiologist for an hour, 
• a sound booth for 30 minutes, and 
• specific testing equipment for 30 minutes. 

Other systems may let you schedule your hour-long appointment with an audiologist, but they can’t allocate other resources or reserve rooms or equipment for just a portion of the appointment – but Auditdata Manage can. This advanced resource scheduler allows you to easily book resources (audiologists, space, equipment) for the exact amount of time you need. 

Also, are your audiologists wasting time examining customers with no hearing loss? The old adage is true: time is money. So, why not use an iPad screening tool to pre-qualify leads and ensure that your audiologists only see customers with hearing loss. As a result, your clinics will have a very high conversion rate.

Pre-qualifying leads with an iPad hearing screener means that your clinic’s audiologists can prioritize customers with proven hearing loss and avoid wasting time on appointments for people with proper hearing. 

Auditdata’s Engage is quick, simple, user-friendly, and cost-effective screening solution to acquire new customers with hearing loss. This simple change in protocol means you can boost hearing aid sales and other key performance indicators (KPIs).

It’s much smarter to use a digital system to streamline and simplify this task to eliminate your complex Excel sheets and mountains of paperwork. Auditdata is localized in different countries, and we’re well-equipped to support the different reimbursement systems worldwide, including in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.  

For instance, in the United States, hearing clinics need to fill out an HCFA claim form if someone is buying hearing aids, and then the information is sent to the customer’s insurance company. Auditdata Manage handles every step of that process, including entering the information, tracking it, and submitting it for payment. 

In Canada, there are multiple reimbursement systems that are supported by Manage. If your customer is a war veteran, you’d need to work through Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC). 

In Australia, hearing aids are available on some mid- and top tier extras policies. While hearing aids are not covered by Medicare in Australia, the Australian Government Hearing Services Program provides them for some people.

Tech solutions make the important reimbursement task much more streamlined, efficient, and accurate.

Whenever hearing clinics need to calibrate their audiological equipment, they typically need to wait for a technician to come onsite to provide service. This results in equipment disruptions and downtime, which is inefficient for your business and inconvenient for your clients.  Plus, downtime means losing out on sales – sometimes for days!

Buy SWAP service, where you can receive calibrated transducers to your clinics well in advance of the calibration due date for the old ones. You plug in the new transducers, and you’re ready for your next client without any interruption or downtime. Our customers find that it saves about 2.000 GBP per clinic in missed revenue to calibrate your own audiometer the old way.

With the SWAP service, you pack up your old equipment and return the expired transducers to Auditdata through the mail. It’s simple, convenient, and a much better way to calibrate! 

Change is inevitable, so your clinic managers should have strategies to deal with whatever comes your way. Perhaps you’re feeling threatened by more hearing manufacturer-controlled retailers entering the market or a competing clinic moving to your neighborhood. And many hearing clinics are worried about over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids disrupting the industry. 

It’s wise to stay educated about what’s happening in the industry and be aware of upcoming trends. It can be helpful to join industry associations and participate in learning opportunities, such as webinars and conferences. 

Ensure that your marketing efforts make sense for the current climate. For instance, if a competing practice is moving to your neighborhood, be certain that your marketing materials spotlight your differentiators. Perhaps you have extended hours to appeal to the professionals that work 9-5, or you have the widest selection of products in the area. Showcase whatever sets you apart and makes you better than the competition.

And surround yourself with smart, supportive people that can help you navigate any changes in the industry and in your practice.

Your clinic is only as strong as its weakest link, so cultivate a winning team.  This means surrounding yourself with intelligent, compassionate, professional employees, who are all contributing to your clinic’s (and customers’) successes. 

When hiring, look beyond carefully curated resumes and CVs. Make sure potential employees are friendly, smart, caring, and treat customers and colleagues with respect. Before hiring any potential employee, determine whether they’ll be a good fit for your company’s culture. They could have an impressive pedigree and extensive experience, but if they’re rude, unpleasant, entitled, or lazy, they won’t be a good addition to your team.

Another thing to consider is whether all your employees are goal-oriented and working collaboratively to hit specific metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Many clinics offer performance-based incentives. This can be given individually to top performers or can be a team reward when the clinic hits specific goals or milestones. Examples of these are: performance in sales, number of fittings, or lowest return rates.

You can use the right tools, proper protocols, and best-in-class standards, but if you have underperforming, unprofessional, unkind employees, it’s a huge problem that can cause ongoing ramifications in your clinic.  Take proactive steps to train or discipline problem employees.  If these actions don’t help improve the situation, replace the problematic employee with someone who will exceed your expectations.