One way many eye care practices define business successis by growth. Growth is exciting! Growth sometimes looks like adding more people to the team, onboarding new eye care providers, or even expanding to open new locations. While growth is a great thing and usually means that a practice is thriving, it can sometimes present with its unique challenges.

My practice has 3 locations, 7 eye care providers, and approximately 55 employees. As our team and business has grown, a major challenge we have encountered is ensuring that every location and every team member delivers consistent messaging about our business brand, patient care, and even specific eye conditions, such as presbyopia. Inconsistent messaging leads to chaos, lack of brand identity, misunderstanding, and confusion. The bigger the growth, the greater the likelihood that locations behave like individual silos (rather than performing like an extension of a bigger team) or that team members create their own approach to patient care or conditions. Keeping a consistent message does not mean every location has to be a “copy and paste” copycat, nor does it mean that there is not an opportunity to accommodate individual preferences in patient care. Consistent messaging ultimately ensures patients will receive the same level of care and education regardless of who they interact with or which location they visit.

While the importance of consistent messaging applies to all areas of a business, in this article I will focus on consistent messaging regarding presbyopia as a specific example. Here are a few tips my practice has used to keep us consistent in messaging with presbyopia as we continue to grow.

1. Create a Clear Policy: This often starts at the top as the owners/leaders/trustees need to first create or define what a specific policy will be for the practice. For eye care conditions like presbyopia, a “policy” is really a cohesive understanding of the definition of presbyopia and establishing what the practice’s approach to presbyopia will be. An example of establishing the presbyopia approach could include ensuring that team members emphasize that it is a common condition that patients will encounter (as opposed to an end-of-lifespan catastrophe), avoiding language like “old age” (this verbiage can leave a negative impression), and ensuring that all presbyopia vision-correction options are proactively discussed with patients. My practice emphasizes a proactive approach because presbyopia patients often do not initiate talking about different treatment options if they do not know that numerous treatments for presbyopia exist. Not only are we proactive in these discussions, but we also make great efforts to bring awareness of the multiple options and to provide patients with educational material about the various treatments for which they are a candidate. Sometimes these efforts are purely educational discussions that plant the seed for future presbyopia conversations with patients. Presbyopia treatment options could be a combination of glasses, contact lenses, surgery, or topical pharmacologic agents that will best compliment the patient’s visual needs and lifestyle. Having a clear policy on presbyopia ensures that patients will leave with an understanding of all their options regardless of which team member they work with or which location they visit. It would be a very poor patient experience for one patient to leave our office thinking the only option was over-the-counter reading glasses and another patient leaving having learned about the multitude of various lens, surgical, or topical prescriptions options available to them. Patients compare notes and share their experiences outside the office. No practice wants patients to be caught in the “my eye care practice did not tell me about that” line of crossfire. Creating a clear office policy or approach to an eye condition is the first step in ensuring that messaging is consistent, and that policy should encourage consistent language so there is little variability to cause confusion.

2. Establish Clear Communication Channels: Once a policy is created, the next step is informing all team members about the policy and establishing a clear channel of communication. At my practice, we first send out a universal email to all employees of the new policy/product/approach. This email ensures everyone has the exact same information (rather than a game of telephone) and that everyone is informed at the same time (i.e., avoiding the common employee response of “well, nobody ever told me about that”). After the universal email, the next step in our communication channel is to have the office managers and department leads at each location announce and discuss the policy at their individual office or department meetings. We also use a monthly newsletter as a communication channel to ensure that every employee is familiar with the policy or approach to various eye care conditions. The newsletter allows for creative flexibility to present the information in a different way to keep it fresh and interesting. With communication, repetition is key. An email, meeting discussion, and newsletter are good starts to establishing clear communication channels to keep messaging consistent. 

3. Provide Ongoing Training: Another way to assure repetition is to provide ongoing training to team members. Ongoing training ensures that the information is on the forefront of the employees’ minds and keeps team members up to date on the latest developments and innovations on various presbyopia products or treatments. If a new multifocal contact lens, multifocal intraocular lens, or presbyopia drop hits the market, I want to make sure my team is current on the latest advancements. Because team members have different learning styles, ongoing training also allows for information to be processed differently or gradually over time. This process usually leads to greater knowledge retention. Webinars, podcasts, and continuing education courses are great for ongoing education about presbyopia; however, these methods should be used as adjuncts. These outside learning opportunities cannot replace ongoing training in house, as there is no guarantee that outside sources will have the same messaging needed to be consistent within your practice. Effective training needs to happen as frequently as weekly, monthly, or quarterly. A once-yearly refresher on presbyopia likely is not going to ensure that messaging stays consistent. Making ongoing training a priority has helped ensure that my practice has sustained consistent presbyopia messaging as we grow and also as new presbyopia innovations develop.

4. Monitor and Evaluate: Regularly monitoring the implementation of consistent messaging is important to identify deviations, and to redirect those deviations as early as possible to stay on course and keep the message consistent. Even the clearest plan and best of intentions sometimes result in an execution not going as planned. Monitoring the effectiveness of an approach to presbyopia helps identify areas for improvement and allows time to make necessary changes before negative consequences occur. One way I monitor for consistent messaging is simply listening. Listening to what team members are saying to patients (i.e., open the office door and listen to hallway chatter) and listening to what patient feedback is (i.e., from verbal conversations or reading patient reviews) are 2 low cost ways to gain great insight. I also pull financial and billing code reports to look at the total number of multifocal contact lens fittings, and office/computer and progressive lens optical sales per office location. Sometimes I have friends or family members visit different locations as “undercover patients” to identify areas of inconsistency from an outsider’s perspective. There are numerous ways to monitor and evaluate how consistent or inconsistent presbyopia messaging is. The important thing is to ensure you are monitoring and evaluating it routinely.

Maintaining consistent messaging across multiple eye care locations is crucial for building trust with patients, creating consistent quality of care, and establishing a strong brand identity. A consistent message has become part of our practice’s brand and is a quality that makes our patient care experience stand out among our competitors. While these tips have helped my practice to maintain consistent messaging as we continue to grow, there are always multiple approaches to ensuring your office achieves success. The beauty of entrepreneurship is the ability to pivot when something does not align and to continue processes and systems that do!

Jessilin M. Quint, OD, MBA, MS, FAAO co-owns Smart Eye Care and Smart Eye & Med Spa in Maine. She serves on the Executive Meetings Committee of the American Optometry Association and the Maine Optometric Association Board of Directors and is a member of the Intrepid Eye Society. She has been an active volunteer, presenter, and author.