An all-too-common scenario: a patient searches for a provider, finds your website, attempts to book an appointment, and … gets stuck. It could be a page that loads at a glacial pace or having to fill out a slew of headache-triggering forms — before they even know if you have availability.
Nearly 80% of patients who switch providers say they’ve left due to “navigation factors” like inadequate digital solutions and bad experiences with administrative staff. That should make every practice look hard at what happens before a patient ever walks in the door.
A high-converting booking experience makes the next step easy and obvious.
Online Booking, But Make It Better
Online booking on your practice’s website is now table stakes for a good patient experience. Nearly a quarter of people said they’d walk away if booking an appointment wasn’t as easy as making a dinner reservation, one survey recently found.
But simply having online booking isn’t the same as having it work well.
Many booking flows are not built as a single seamless experience. They may be cobbled together from various separate vendors: a homepage from one, a scheduler from another, an EHR portal from a third.
By the time a patient moves from your homepage to your booking tool, they may have passed through four or five different interfaces, and each is a chance to lose them.
Google data shows that 53% of visitors leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. Research on other industries like retail and travel shows that just a 0.1 second improvement in load speed boosts conversions by as much as 10%.
Site placement matters. In a study of more than 1.3 million patients, 45% knew their practice offered online booking, but only 15% had used it. Patient use varied widely depending on how practices promoted and organized their online appointments.
Patients Are Booking When You’re Not There
And what if you don’t have online booking? You’re missing out on up to half your patient volume. Zocdoc’s latest data shows that 43% of bookings happen outside of regular office hours: during early-morning commutes, late-night catch-ups, or weekend chores.
If patients can’t book your practice when they’re actively searching for care, they’ll book someone else. You need to be reachable when patients are ready to act.
What the Best Booking Experiences Have in Common
The practices that convert patients well are not doing anything particularly complex or costly, but they have gotten these basics right:
- Your booking page is easy to find. Patients should not have to hunt for the option to book. The button or link should be visible across the website (not buried in a menu) and the experience should feel consistent whether someone arrives from Google, an insurance directory, or the your practice homepage.
- It works on mobile. More than 70% of Zocdoc appointments are booked via mobile devices. An experience that is clunky on a small screen is not just annoying; it’s a conversion killer for the majority of your visitors.
- Key information is easy to find. Think: Provider name, location, availability. Research shows that 84% of patients check online reviews before choosing a new provider — and many dive deep, with over half (51%) reading a minimum of six reviews before making a decision. Patients should see what they want before they are asked to fill anything out. Put the information first, the form second.
- The experience feels cohesive. When a patient moves from a practice website into a booking flow, the transition should be seamless. Consistent design and branding subtly signal that a practice is organized and well-run.
- There are fewer steps, not more. Every additional screen in the flow is a potential exit point. Aim to create the shortest path from patient intent to confirmed appointment.
What Success Looks Like
Practices that address booking friction stop guessing at why appointment volume feels flat, because they can see where patients are dropping off and fix it.
“The best place to start is by mapping out the patient journey end to end. Where are patients finding you? And once they do, is it easy for them to book an appointment in that same place?” suggests Christine Sherlock, who leads customer success teams at Zocdoc and works with practices to solve their booking friction challenges. “If the answer is no, that’s likely where you’re losing people early on.”
Further down in the funnel, “the places where we typically see leakage include insurance verification, intake forms, appointment confirmation — operational processes,” she adds. “Automating what you can will help.”
When your site booking flow is working smoothly, your marketing spend goes further because the traffic you generate converts from page views to actual booked visits. Your front desk fields fewer calls from patients who tried to book online and gave up in frustration.
Make Your Website Work Harder for You
Zocdoc has spent nearly two decades building seamless online booking experiences with the Marketplace, making it easy for patients to find and book a provider in a few simple clicks.
Now you can add that same intuitive infrastructure to your own practice website. Our Website Scheduling feature now offers a fully branded, mobile-first scheduling experience that powers your website and connects to your Google presence — so no matter where patients find you, they stay in a seamless flow. Patients can search, choose, and book without bouncing between systems.
This simplicity and convenience matter more than you think. When an experience feels cohesive and brings clarity over confusion, patients are far more likely to follow through.
A LexisNexis report found that people who find their providers very easy to work with are nine times more likely to stay.
And practices already using Website Scheduling are seeing real impact, with early partners driving up to 60% more bookings after making the switch.
How It Can Help Your Practice
You’re already doing the hard work to get patients to your site. Website Scheduling helps make sure more of them actually book.
Your Zocdoc team can help you make the most of Website Scheduling based on how patients are already finding your practice. They can walk you through setup, review how it fits into your current site experience, and identify opportunities to help more visitors complete a booking. Log in.
Not yet on Zocdoc? Learn how Zocdoc can help your practice connect with patients looking for care and talk with our team about how Website Scheduling can support your growth. Get started.
Learn more about Website Scheduling.