contact lens business
Strategic Dispensing
Want to be your patients' primary source for contact lenses? These strategies can help.
By Christopher Kent, Senior Associate Editor

If you fit contact lenses, maintaining profitable dispensing is always an issue, especially with direct-to-consumer companies everywhere.  In an informal survey, contact lens dispensing practitioners offered the following strategies to help keep patients buying lenses from your practice -- instead of the bargain basement.

Inventory judiciously. Keeping an inventory of contact lenses and buying in bulk have clear advantages, but storage space or a small number of patients can be a problem. To help:

• If you do keep an inventory, only stock the most popular products and parameters.
• Only inventory products that your sales reps are willing to ex-change or take back at any time. (Get that commitment in writing.)
• Get your sales reps to monitor inventory and rotate product on a monthly basis.
• If you don't keep an item in stock, try to make sure you can get it overnight.

Encourage patients to buy a year's supply at once. This is convenient for the patient and good for your practice. Most manufacturers offer the patient rebates if a year's supply is purchased at once, and most will ship the lenses directly to the patient's home (often at no charge). This also helps minimize inventory needs in your practice. Most important, it keeps patients from looking for another purchasing source every time they need lenses.

Don't mail reminder cards. Instead, use e-mail reminders. They go out automatically, and if you have several hundred patients, the savings in postage will be significant. All you have to do is include a request for an e-mail address on your patient sign-up form.

Let patients purchase contact lenses through your Web site. Several companies now offer to set this up for you in such a way that they handle the transaction, but it appears to be entirely done through your practice. In some cases, setup is free. Advantages include:

• Patients can order any time, night or day, and they don't have to wait for your approval as they would with services such as 1-800 Contacts. (You can control which options are available to them.)
• These services can send reminder e-mails for you as well. This has the added advantage of linking the patient directly to your Web site so he can buy the lenses while the e-mail reminder is right in front of him.
• You don't have to offer this to every patient if you're afraid you may encourage price-shopping. A history form question asking new patients whether they've ever shopped the Internet for lenses will tell you which patients are good candidates for this option.
• The time and space you save makes it feasible to offer a small discount (say, 5%) to patients who buy their lenses from you in this way.

If you're not interested in pursuing the Internet option, consider offering your patients the option of ordering from you via 24-hour voicemail, e-mail, or fax.

If a direct-to-consumer service calls to verify a prescription, contact the patient about your own Web site. Even if your price isn't as low, many patients would prefer getting their lenses from an "official" source and not having to wait for prescription confirmation when they order.

Use video -- in the office and over the Web. A number of companies now sell or lease video devices that let patients see how they look in different frames and contact lenses without having to try them on. Some even let patients do this from their home computer. If a patient can see how she looks in colored or costume lenses by visiting your Web site, she'll probably purchase them from you.