Massage Office Phone Etiquette

The massage office phone is often the first client interaction (besides the website or referral from a client/doctor/other) and is of vital importance to building a solid massage business. No matter if it is in a mulit-practitioner clinic or spa or a self-employed massage business, knowing how to answer the phone and engage the potential client in a conversation can help the potential client feel more at ease about their decision for calling.

I haven’t written about things like this much because I just take it for granted people know how to answer the phone. I was in customer service for 12 years before I became a massage therapist. It is the curse of knowledge that Chip Heath talks about in his book “Made to Stick”. We often forget how it was before we knew something.

In the past few years I have been going to various spas and clinics and the degree of service varies from non-existent -Oh is there a client on the phone wanting to give me their money for a massage but I’ll just continue to do my scheduling updates and be distracted - to mediocre - does the job, gets the appointment but there is no connection. I guess I have yet to find a place or massage therapist who knows how to engage a client right from the beginning.

The first phone call is important as it sets up the basis for the relationship and can influence whether it is going to be one appointment, a series of appointments over a month or two or a client for life coming 2x a week for 18 years. Cherie Sohnen Moe in her book “Business Mastery” says:

Every time you answer the telephone, you create an impression. The question remains what that impression will be. Within the first few seconds of a conversation you convey how you feel about yourself, your practice and the caller.

Some of my pet peeves are:

• I ask for deep tissue massage and ask for the person most versed in deep tissue. The response is all of our therapists do deep tissue. A better response would be a question like what do you mean by deep tissue? or what types of massage have you had before? I went to a clinic last year that said everyone did deep tissue and I went through 3 different therapists and none really did deep tissue by my standards. The thing they don’t realize is that my deep tissue experience comes from Zentherapy an offshoot of Rolfing. It is deep.
• While calling for an appointment the person on the phone continues to talk to someone who is standing in front of them without putting the phone on hold. This is a privacy violation in addition to just being unprofessional.
• While calling for an appointment, I get the person who is distracted making copies of the schedule for the massage therapists there and the appointment book is all taken apart. I know this because she tells me. She also continues to try to make an appointment for me rustling through papers looking for an opening. A more appropriate response might be to ask if she could call me back in a minute or put me on hold for a minute

These are just a few things that have happened in the past month with me. The people answering the phone were receptionists and not massage therapists. Maybe I am too critical, but I just keep thinking about what if it was a new client who never had a massage - what would their impression be of making an appointment?

If the person who is answering the phone is not a skilled massage therapist it is important to educate them thoroughly about massage and answering the phone. The receptionist should get regular massages from all of the massage therapists so that they can describe and know each massage therapists style and type of work. They should also be trained in asking clients questions that show that they know what they are talking about. It reflects on your business when they don’t.

Design a questionnaire for your receptionist and have them practice taking calls and sit with them while taking calls for the first week or so. Improving client communication begins with the first phone call.

• know how to describe all of the services and techniques in detail
• know each massage therapist and their skills personally
• be prepared for each call with necessary materials for making appointments, referrals
• know what the office policies and procedures are and know how to execute them appropriately
• answer the phone promptly with one ring
• don’t be eating or doing other distracting things when answering the phone
• follow through with everything you say you are going to do on the call in the time frame you agreed on
• if you need to put someone on hold ask if it ok and let them know how long you think you will be on hold if you can.  If it is too long ask to call them back.

If you are answering your phone it is important that you take the time needed to talk to each caller and ease their hesitations. Ask questions like “What do you need a massage for today?” Some sort of pain or stress? Then you can respond with something like “yes I work with that all the time”. What most people want to know is are you able to handle the problem that they are having.

Knowing what a client needs is important as it will help you make appropriate decisions regarding their care.

In a good phone call you will also be able to screen clients for inappropriate requests or conditions that are out of your scope of practice. You can also find out if that client is appropriate for your business. You don’t have to take everyone who calls. That was a big revelation to a massage therapist on my discussion group.

Every phone call deserves your complete attention.

I use a voice mail service to answer incoming calls. While this is less personal, working alone I never found a need for a receptionist. I do answer the phone if I am sitting at my desk but I always make sure I am not going to be distracted with a client coming in a minute or whatever. I always leave time in my schedule every few hours to return phone calls promptly the same day.

Resources:
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Business Mastery : A Guide for Creating a Fulfilling, Thriving Business and Keeping It Successful

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Writing Sales Copy for your Massage Business

One of the challenges of being a massage therapist is that you have to wear many hats. You are the massage therapist, the website designer, the bookkeeper, the janitor, the marketing and networking supervisor. You have to combine all of these skills and create a successful massage business.

One of the things I see a lot of and am even guilty of myself are websites or other marketing material that is supposed to be promoting your services and it turns out it is really all about you - you have this degree, credential, skill, experience or whatever it is. You offer this service, you do this… The vital thing that is missing is connecting with the reader (potential client). What they want to know is what is in it for them! People are only interested in themselves and how it will affect their lives or solve the problem that they are having.

Most people don’t really know the difference between swedish massage or cranio-sacral therapy. They don’t care how long you have been doing massage. They don’t know what the names of all the muscles are and don’t care if it is their splenius that is causing their neck pain or not. They only care about how it will help them feel better.

So how do you take what you do - massage- and what you know ( from massage school as well as life experiences) and create sales copy that doesn’t sound like a used car sales man but gets you what you want - new clients!

The first step as outlined in this free Ebook “Make Your words Sell” by Ken Evoy is is to get into the shoes of your reader/target. Who are they? What do they want for themselves? What do they value most? And here is the part that massage therapists cringe over- who can afford your services? Massage therapists in general want to just be able to provide massage for everyone and even seem to be drawn to people who can’t afford massage. The best way to be able to provide massage to this population is to focus on finding those who can afford you and make enough money so that you can do something like set up a clinic for low income families. Trying to work on these people without having your basic needs - enough money to pay the bills, take the vacations that you want, save for retirement - is a sure way to end up in burnout.

Another thing to become aware of is learning to talk about the benefits of massage in a way that people understand. How does ‘increasing circulation’ apply to someone who is in pain or has a herniated disc? Massage relaxes muscles but who really cares - how does a tight muscle cause pain?

These are just a few of the many things you can do for your website and brochures.  In order to create effective marketing materials you need to either hire a sales/marketing person to write your ads or website for you or study and learn about it.  One of the best sources are the Free Ebooks from Site Build it!  You don’t need to have a SBI! website even and all of the principles can really be applied to any marketing pieces.  You can learn more in the free Ebook “Make Your words Sell” by Ken Evoy.   I am just reading it now so will be sharing more as I get through it. It is a few hundred pages and it used to cost $30 but it is now free for anyone to learn from.

Posted in Building Your Practice, Recommended Reading, Starting Your Practice, The Wealthy Massage Therapist, Websites for Massage therapists | No Comments »

Keep your Massage Business Booming

The two best ways to get the clients you need to keep your massage business booming are getting referrals from current clients, physicians and other health care providers and Search Engine Optimization for your website.

Getting referrals from others is about learning to ask for what you need. Lynn Grodzki of Private Practice Success speaks of it this way:

But in a small business, letting other people know about your business needs is a necessary interaction. As business people, we need a way to communicate our legitimate business needs, such as our need for referrals (the life blood of our business), in a way that matches our sensibilities and ethics.

The best way for people to find a massage therapist is to go on referrals from their friends, neighbors, coworkers, physicians and other health care providers - or just about anyone. There seems to be some hesitancy with massage therapists to ask for referrals from clients or others because they don’t want to be seen as being salesey or pushy yet they continue to say they don’t have enough clients to make ends meet. There are a few ways you can go about getting referrals from clients such as creating an incentive program for people to refer to you - like if they refer 3 people or something like that they would get a free half hour massage. I think that works for some, but I actually think the best way to get referrals for your massage business is to just do the best massage of your life with each client. When people go back to work or home or wherever they are off to and are feeling their best- it will show and they will be talking about how good they do feel. That is the best kind of referral.

Getting physicians or other health care providers to refer to you requires that you build a reputation for yourself. The best way is to actually find a someone that you would want to go to yourself or refer others to. You don’t just want any old person referring to you. You need to get referrals from people who understand and match your values and philosophy on healing otherwise there will be too many possibilities for misunderstandings. I used to get referrals from a chiropractor who wanted people to come in 2x a day -5 days a week. I just didn’t agree with this type of service. He only did it with people who were in car accidents who had insurance companies with open pockets waiting to pay him. I would tell people that they just have to go by what they feel and most would want to leave his care causing some difficulties between us. So it is important to find someone who works in a similar manner to you. Would you send your mother to this person or would you go yourself? That is the litmus test.

Also once you find someone you trust - go to them for care. This is the best way to find out more about what they do and tell them about what you do. Actually you may not even have to tell them anything more than you are a massage therapist down the street from them. This is the way I build most of my practice when I first started. I started seeing a chiropractor and the next thing I know his whole family was coming to me and then he started referring all his patients.

The key to asking for what you want is to build relationships with others just based on wanting to create a relationship -not just about asking for referrals.

The other way to get a constant stream of clients is by having a website that gets you new clients every week. That means you have to have one that search engines find and that people click on. To do this you need to create pages that are optimized for the search engines using the most popular keywords (most likely some variation of ‘massage, your city’). To create a page that is optimized you also have to know how to create file names with the keywords as well as metatags -descriptions and keywords. I have a page on my website about formatting pages to help you get an idea of what it is about.

Some other ways of getting your site found are to just create as many pages as you can writing about what you do. Have a separate page for each technique to explain it in detail and share your experiences with this technique or method. Share why you trained in it and what you feel you can do with it. The more content the better for search engines and your readers.

Getting others to link to your site also helps create traffic. There are many ways to do this but the first thing is to get health care providers that you refer to to link to your site by first giving a link to them! I have written more about creating links on my website www.workless-playmore.com

Keeping yourself focused on what you can do for yourself and your practice rather than just complaining that you don’t have enough clients is to keep focused on these two things. What can you do today to take one step towards getting a referral or building a website? If you don’t have the money for a website makes me wonder just how committed you are to being successful.

I of course use and recommend Site Build it! for webhosting because it is much more than just a webhost. It takes you through a process of thinking about your business and creating a plan for success. While I have talked about SBI! extensively in all of my websites and forums, it can be very overwhelming. It took me 2 years of hearing about it before I took the leap and created my first site. I did start out with a free webhost and then moved up to Front Page. It wasn’t as scary taking the leap to SBI! So even if you can’t start with an SBI! site start with what you can do. Create a free site or use another template driven site. Do whatever you have to do. You can start with this Free Manual from SBI! about taking your Service Business online and apply it in any way you can.

I also am available to help you create a website for your massage practice. I charge $600 for an 8 page website (in addition to the $299 hosting fee with SBI!)which is more than half of what you would be charged by a SBI! webmaster. The reason why I am charging so much less is that I know the massage business and I want massage therapists to be successful and be able to get the clients that they need.

Posted in Building Your Practice, Starting Your Practice, The Wealthy Massage Therapist, Websites for Massage therapists | 1 Comment »

Blogging for Massage Therapists

The past few years I have been blogging with Wordpress and love it even though it doesn’t make me as much money as my SBI! website.  I was getting about the same amount of traffic but for some reason, the adsense system didn’t work as well with the blog.  I think it has something to do with the layout of the pages and the way the keywords are set up even though I tried to do everything I could to set it up like an SBI! website.

Through the years I have been learning wordpress and collecting various tidbits of information on how to set up and use a wordpress blog for getting the best results.  I have decided to put them all in on Ebook that I am now selling on www.workless-playmore.com  While you can get most of the information for free, you may not want to spend the 6 months or so to collect it all and get it set up.

I did already talk about this back in February but I never set up the link for purchasing for some odd reason that I can’t remember.  It could be the bought with the stomach flu and then bronchitis. Anyways it is good to go now.

Blogging is a great way to get your message out to potential clients and keep them coming back to your website.  (You don’t even need a website.  You can just set up a blog through ez-web-hosting.com and read the Ebook to help you get it all set up.  It is fairly easy with just uploading themes and templates and plugins that I recommend to get you started.)

What stops people is usually what are they going to write about?  Well what do you talk to clients about all day?  What do you say to doctors or other health care professionals that you are networking with?  How do you educate your clients as to the benefits that massage can bring into their lives?  That’s all you need to write about.  You write like you talk to others.  It is actually better if it is written for a 6th grade reading level to keep people’s attention and interest.

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The future of the Massage Profession

With so many concerns of the economic challenges that are being faced and will be faced with what does the future hold for the massage profession? As a massage therapist for the last 20 years and an avid participant in the many online groups and through contact with my many readers, I can see that most of the massage profession struggles to get by. (Maybe it’s just because you don’t hear as much about the successful stories. They are out there though, I am sure.)

ABMP reports in their metrics section at www.massagetherapy.com that :

Average massage-related income for massage therapists in 2005 was $18,950, with a median income of $14,500 (2005 ABMP Member Survey)

Total earnings by massage therapists, including their earnings from other employment, were $32,506 (2005 ABMP Member Survey).

First-year practice average income was $9,589, reflecting the challenges of establishing a professional-service practice (2005 ABMP Member Survey).

ABMP estimates some 50,000 massage therapists leave the profession each year.

The average age of ABMP members graduating in 2007 and entering the profession is 44. The median age is 45.

Close to 83 percent are women and 54.5 percent are married.

As massage therapists look for other ways of making a living they are choosing to take low paying jobs just to get by. Massage Envy was one of the top franchises last year and this I just found online so I am not sure how true it is “As of this month, Massage Envy, which was founded in 2002 and reported nearly $100 million in sales last year, has 120 locations and 248 more under development in 30 states.” They pay their employees $12-$15 an hour from what I have heard -plus tips.

They are choosing to accept insurance as payment or join discount insurance networks just to get by. I am a provider here in WA State and have been since about 2000 when they started allowing massage therapists to be contracted providers with insurance companies. When it first started there were a few companies who paid fairly well but some who paid poorly -(less than the average of $60 for a massage in the US). I have yet to see them raise their allowable fees and most are reducing what they pay and also the allowable benefits. Each year it gets less and less and gets harder to get paid. Managed care makes it harder to make a living.

Since the median age of massage therapists is 45 according to the recent ABMP survey, where does that leave massage therapists as they move into their retirement years? Most massage therapists are coming into the massage profession as a second or third career and thinking of it as a way to supplement retirement or slow down until they retire. They are seeking a more fulfilling career working with others.

And where are all the men in the profession? With low paying jobs how can men support their families? With men as a minority in the profession it shows that there are still many preconceived notions about touch. Women don’t want to be massaged by men and men don’t want to be massaged by men. With this challenge men are leaning away from the massage profession for better paying jobs where they are more accepted.

With such struggles along with the physical, mental and emotional demands of being a massage therapist, many see this as a part time profession. They also perceive it to be more of a calling than a way to make a living and lack a clearly defined business model. Is massage a hobby or a business?

I also have been receiving many communications through my website www.massagetherapycareers.com in the frequently asked questions section from high school students looking into careers in massage. They ask about what jobs pay and where can they get a massage but their main questions are things like “Do I have to take math or science classes?” which makes me think they are just looking for an easy career (which massage is not.) Since most massage schools are just looking to fill their classes they tend to make massage careers look glamorous and appealing. While in the past most massage therapists have started their own business, many more are now taking those low paying Massage Envy jobs which will be affecting the whole massage profession and changing it from one of healing, compassion and learning to just another job.

The massage profession also is in the midst of a big controversy over licensing and legislation issues. How much training and education is required to become a successful massage therapist? How is massage and medical massage defined? We have yet to define these things for ourselves so now insurance companies are doing it for us. (In WA State there is one insurance company creating a special massage credential that defines how much education is required for a massage therapist in their provider network.)

So what is in our future? How can we take more control of where we are going as a whole and not let the economy and money over-ride client/patient care?

The Future of Massage - Whitney Lowe

Posted in Building Your Practice, Health and healing, Licensing and Legislation, Massage Therapy Jobs, Starting Your Practice | No Comments »