Why your practice suffers when you leave out PD
It may seem counter-intuitive, but providing pupillary distance (PD) measurements as part of your standard service can actually drive sales growth and practice success. To understand why, you need to first put yourself in your patient's shoes. Let's explore how embracing transparency and a comprehensive service can lead to increased revenue and patient loyalty.
The Patient Journey
Let's imagine a customer who already wears glasses but wants to get an up-to-date prescription to purchase a new pair. They have never purchased glasses online before but are considering it this time. Perhaps they are a young adult and are purchasing their first pair of glasses outside of their parent's health insurance. They book an exam with an optometrist - perhaps the one their parents used when they were younger, or perhaps a new one because they have moved since.
When they book their eye exam, even though they are planning to purchase glasses online, they will not ask about whether or not the PD is included in the prescription as they don't know it's something they need. They come in for their eye exam where their prescription gets a slight update, nothing out of the ordinary. They are asked by your staff if they'd like to look at frames in the optical store, but they politely decline. They pay and leave with a copy of their prescription in hand.
Their email box and social media feed has already been filled with promotions. By Googling your phone number online, your patient's intent sent a strong signal to Google, and the big online eyewear retailers are automatically bidding on advertising that may drive your patient to their website. They visit a few sites, as well as do some independent web searches. There are some good promotions, and they are time-limited. Some end in just two days! Google has shared information with the advertisers, allowing them to infer with high probability that your patient has visited you and likely has a new prescription to fill.
After some online browsing for styles, your patient makes a point to set some time aside at the end of their day to order their glasses - before the promotion is up. They gather their credit card and prescription. They find frames that are not too unlike what they have now. With guidance from the website's helpful graphics, they are able to compare the measurements of the glasses they are currently wearing to those they are considering. They make sure the arm length, the bridge width, the lens width, and the lens height are all quite comparable. They err on the side of slightly larger for most of these.
They add the chosen frames to their cart, but first, they have to select their lenses. It's upsell central! Blue light blocking, photochromic, ID Guard, high-index... They choose what they think makes sense for them. But the price of the glasses has now doubled. They click next and are presented with another round of upsells. Anti-reflective, water-resistant, oil-resistant, anti-fog - again they pick the middle-of-the-road options. They can now finally do what they were looking forward to - choose the frame for the prescription sunglasses they'll get for free if they order tonight!
So that's what they do. They get a bit more adventurous with the sunglasses. If they aren't perfect, that's ok, they're a bonus, right? Plus, bigger is better when it comes to sunglasses. They add them to the cart and are presented with some lens options again, including the color of the tint. It's a bit simpler this time, so they quickly get to the next step. Time to enter the prescription.
They are presented with a couple of options: upload a picture or document, or enter manually. The prescription is gibberish to them - SPH, CYL, AX - they have no idea what any of these mean. And what's the deal with the OS and OD? They snap a picture, and some super smart algorithm extracts the numbers they need into the online chart. But wait, there's a separate field for something called PD, but they can't find it anywhere on the prescription. There's a little question mark icon on the website, so they click on it. It tells them what the pupillary distance is, what a typical value looks like in millimeters. It also says that if their PD is not on the prescription, they can easily measure themselves by printing out a PD ruler in PDF format and following a tutorial video. Both are linked in the little info box.
They click the link but then remember they don't have a printer. Who has a printer at home these days? So they turn to Google, or maybe even ChatGPT these days: "how to measure PD". They are presented with options: more rulers, apps, even average values. Something doesn't seem right. They recall sitting in a fancy chair, in a fancy office while an eye doctor used fancy equipment to take all sorts of measurements. They concentrated hard on the tricky choices to decipher which letters appeared clearer than the others - being afraid to end up with anything less than the best vision possible. They also remember a super uncomfortable eye puff test and the pupil dilation drops that left them feeling like they were on the surface of the sun when they exited your office.
They start questioning why they should be measuring their own eyes in front of the bathroom mirror with a paper ruler they printed after all of that. They Google "optometrist didn't give me pd" and find tons of results of other upset patients. Reddit, Facebook, X, Quora, etc. Some of these patients have already called back and were declined this information over the phone. Some had asked after their exams before leaving, to also have been declined. A few newspaper and online articles about the practice of keeping the PD measurement on the dispensing side of eyewear. Some are rather bold and draw a clear line in the sand - they inform your patient that their PD was withheld to prevent them from buying glasses online.
Your patient booked an appointment, underwent the exam under your direction, and paid for their prescription before leaving. In their mind, they did everything they needed to leave your office with an up-to-date prescription so that they could purchase glasses online. And so, still from their perspective, they received an incomplete prescription. The reason for it, again, from their perspective, appears to be motivated by profit. They were at your office initially with a great deal of trust - but now they likely have little. They are more likely to actively distrust you. If you're in their shoes, can you blame them?
So what happens now? You'll never see this patient again. They were in their mid-twenties and could have been a patient until your retirement and even brought you their kids and spouse. Instead, they are calling up a friend they think has a printer. They are going to measure their own PD in front of the bathroom mirror, get several different measurements, and take the average. They email that number to themselves so that they never forget it - but that's unnecessary - the online retailer will store it for them forever and never ask for it again. The entire situation will be out of mind soon enough. If they suffer from eye strain, headaches, or notice text on their monitor looks better if they tilt their nose up a bit, they won't connect the dots.
Your patient's vision care suffers and so does your bottom line.
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