A streamlined customer success process is essential to the effectiveness of both recruitment agencies and clinical research sites. There are many ways that you can shape this experience to ensure satisfaction for all parties.
Bring your own Research to the table
When engaging with a potential customer, your job as the patient recruitment service is to demonstrate not only your qualifications in recruitment, but also to prove you have a thoughtful plan in place to accommodate a trial’s unique needs.
It’s a good idea to support this plan with actual research, whether it involves data from your own previous trials or from the successes of other trials employing the methods you plan to use. Be detailed in your plan, and remember you’re essentially pitching yourself and your methods to a clinical research organization, so you should give them every reason to trust in your process.
Be flexible
Just as different trials have their own needs, different customers will too. While some customers may be okay with a more hands off approach to content creation or recruitment materials, others might feel more comfortable with being directly involved with every communication you’ll have with patients.
When you onboard a new customer, be sure to explain that you’re happy to work with their specific needs and grant them the flexibility to be as involved as they see fit. (Let them know it’s okay to try one way, and change their minds later, too!)
Don’t Over-Promise
One of the biggest sources of conflict in recruitment-research site relationships is failure to meet expectations. This often occurs as a result of your team promising faster or bigger recruitment goals than you actually have the capacity to meet.
While it may be tempting to up-sell your recruitment services in order to secure a client, setting realistic expectations as a baseline gives you a better chance of delivering reliable results -- and, it becomes possible to surprise your clients by beating your own recruitment promises and exceeding expectations.
Want to Learn More?
In addition to keeping you up to date on all things clinical trials, we also act as a digital CRO with a specific focus on patient recruitment and retention. We believe that patient recruitment and study startup (especially study design and study material) are heavily intertwined. After all, study design can make or break clinical trials, and the patient-perspective should be considered when designing studies to ensure that patient targets are met not only on time, but also on budget.
For Citruslabs, patient recruitment starts with study design and ends with trial completion. We recruit patients through our network of health apps, which enables you to connect with thousands of patients in real time. The best part: these patients are already educated and prepared for the clinical trial process.
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