Crystal Clear’s very own Thomas Couture sits down with Extra Correspondent and National Reporter Terri Seymour at the Aesthetic Everything Beauty Expo in Beverly Hills, CA. to talk about our fully-integrated software, marketing, and employee training platform. To learn more about how our innovative solution can help grow your practice, contact us today at 888-611-8279!
Terri Seymour: So I’m sitting here with Thomas Couture from Crystal Clear. Tommy.
Thomas Couture: Hi.
Terri Seymour: Thank you for joining me.
Thomas Couture: Hi, how are you? Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to sit with you.
Terri Seymour: So you’re from Crystal Clear?
Thomas Couture: Yeah, Crystal Clear Digital Marketing.
Terri Seymour: Tell me all about Crystal Clear, what it is, what you do?
Thomas Couture: Sure, sure. So we’re a fully integrated software marketing and consulting firm for medical practices and wellness businesses. So we work with all different genres. So from plastic and cosmetic surgeons to general and cosmetic dermatologists, medical spas, ophthalmologists, orthopedic surgeons, OB/GYNs, cardiologists, innovative medicine. So if you have a medical practice or a wellness business, we can help you grow it.
Terri Seymour: And tell me just, when you say we can help you grow it, what do you do, what is going to be the benefits.
Thomas Couture: Sure, sure.
Terri Seymour: From working with you.
Thomas Couture: Sure, absolutely so. The benefits of Crystal Clear is that we’re actually three different companies wrapped up into one. So of course, we provide all the marketing for the practice to help drive a higher quality and quantity of traffic for less cost. So we start out by building mobile responsive website. We do all the necessary tasks and duties to help drive traffic to it. So organic optimization, we help manage paid search if they want to do that. We’re doing all the email marketing, all the content creation, blogging, all the social media, all the aspects of what a practice needs to do to get people to find them, right, build a website that’s designed to convert them into opportunities. And then we’ve got an amazing piece of software, it’s called the social patient center and it’s all built and stored in the cloud. It’s HIPAA compliant and it does practice management, opportunity management, lead management, automates practice marketing for them. It does all the tracking and measuring of all the marketing that we’re doing and giving them the results of that.
Terri Seymour: And you said you do social media as well?
Thomas Couture: Social media as well.
Terri Seymour: So you do that daily posts for them.
Thomas Couture: That’s correct.
Terri Seymour: Wow.
Thomas Couture: So we have a content management department and all they do is create content. So we’re creating the post, we’re distributing it amongst, you know, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, even help them with a strategy to implement on Instagram, although that’s a more personal social media application. So we create the content, distribute it all, but everything that we do is tied back to that website and actually spoke about this today, you know, specific landing pages that are embedded in it, that drive people to call to action, so to call the practice or to fill out a contact form to take the next steps. So you’ve got to be able to drive traffic, you’ve got to be able to convert it. And then once you convert it, it comes down to using technology and software to assist in that sales process and then the last thing we do is work with the people. So the part of what Crystal Clear offers is coaching and consulting and really focusing on you know the leadership and the practice and the priorities of the practice and the people, the processes they have in place at the practice and the use of tools. So it’s pretty robust system, we actually get involved with the practice one-on-one and interview employees and build a real marketing plan that suits them specifically based on what they have and what they don’t have, where their areas of inefficiencies. You know, where are they less effective than they could be and we do the right training to make sure that they can convert more of those opportunities into cash.
Terri Seymour: Social media is so important today. So I was fascinated when you said about you do the social media as well, because like you said, to drive the traffic.
Thomas Couture: We do.
Terri Seymour: We find so many things on the social media these days, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.
Thomas Couture: You know, it’s interesting I did a talk just a few weeks ago on marketing to millennials and, you know, its 65 million people. It’s a huge demographic and, you know, they do require more of an experience and connectivity. And if you’re not utilizing social media to the fullest, it’s going to be difficult to attract them and it’s a blended strategy. You’ve got to use all mediums to reach people today. So it is the website, it is social media. It is email marketing. Still in 2019, the primary method of communication in which potential patients want to interact with the business and, you know, 73% of millennials still prefer email believe it or not with the business, but texting is coming on too, right, so.
Terri Seymour: Yeah.
Thomas Couture: So our software also allows the practice to schedule appointments. So it’s got a calendar and you can also have reminders, so appointment reminders.
Terri Seymour: Everybody knows reminders.
Thomas Couture: Emails and text message reminders and it’s got a HIPAA compliant two-way texting because people want to text today and you’ve got to be able to.
Terri Seymour: [Indiscernible] [0:04:54] text faster, right?
Thomas Couture: That’s correct. That’s correct because [Indiscernible] [0:04:57] and this is where I try to explain to practices today that you’ve got a more social patient today and they’re different than it was 10 years ago. They’re carrying around this communication in their hands. And it’s everything from social media to email to the internet and they’re doing searches today, but it’s not behind the desktop. It’s on their mobile device. So you need to have a responsive website that works on every device, right? Long gone are the days where you can have a desktop version and a mobile version, it’s got to be mobile responsive, which means that it automatically reformats to accommodate the device that’s accessing the site.
Terri Seymour: And let me ask you how, in a sentence, how would you describe your business? How would you describe Crystal Clear?
Thomas Couture: I would describe us as a fully integrated software marketing and consulting platform for medical practices and wellness businesses, three companies wrapped up into one because without all of it, you’re not going to get the true results that you could achieve. Marketing is great, but if people call or email the practice and your people don’t know what to say and do and you’re not using the tools to automate things that used to be done manually into a system that sells process, that opportunity is not going to convert into additional treatments sold and additional revenue coming into the practice. You know, our messaging really is, this is a retail business and we are now in a position where we need to understand that all the rules of retail apply to us. We need to have a sales culture in our practice. We need to provide better patient experience and if you can do that, you can increase client retention, increase the probability that they’ll spend more money with you. So increase your per patient revenue, right? Because we look at the lifetime value of the patient, right? There’s acquiring a patient, which is costly, then there’s keeping the patient, right, because the best person to market to is what, the one that already bought from you, right? I mean if you bought from me before, chances are if I do a good job and make you feel special and important, you’ll buy from me again.
Terri Seymour: You’ll stay with me.
Thomas Couture: You’ll stay, yeah. You know it’s my job to let you know about all the additional things that we do, membership programs, reward programs. Our software offers all of these things as well, so.
Terri Seymour: And it’s so timely, those things take up so much time.
Thomas Couture: If you’re running a medical practice, you’re running a medical practice, you know, and the majority of the people that we sit with, they know that what I’m talking about with you is important, but they just don’t have the time to do it because where do they make their money? Serving patients, their providers, right? So that’s what they do best and this is what we do best and our job is really to keep our clients in front of the wave because all this changes so fast. And it’s tough to keep up with it your eyes on all the time.
Terri Seymour: It’s like another job.
Thomas Couture: I mean it really is.
Terri Seymour: So we may as well have you doing it for us.
Thomas Couture: We’re like the super employee that the practice could never hire off the street to do exactly what it is that we do for the investment that they make with us. So and we work with over 400 practices.
Terri Seymour: How many are in your team?
Thomas Couture: So we have about 70 employees in the company right now, yeah. We’re five countries, we work with over 400 medical practices and we’ve achieved a lot of success too. So we’re proud.
Terri Seymour: Congratulations.
Thomas Couture: Yeah.
Terri Seymour: And congratulations on your award today.
Thomas Couture: Yes, we’re getting an award today and we’ve gotten many awards in the past two, which is pretty cool, you know. We’ve gotten a couple of awards from Aesthetic Everything.
Terri Seymour: Aesthetic Everything.
Thomas Couture: Yeah, we won 2016 and 17, you know, best aesthetic provider and we’ve got some awards with the Aesthetic Guide as well. Best Practice marketing 2016 and 17. We’ve been featured on the cover as well of the Aesthetic Guide for our software, the social patient center, in our consulting platform.
Terri Seymour: That’s great. I know some of your clients are here today.
Thomas Couture: Yeah, we do.
Terri Seymour: So there would be catching up with them.
Thomas Couture: Yeah, I think I saw Dr. Chernoff in my first speech and maybe he’ll attend my second one. Yeah, we’ve got a couple of clients kicking around here. So that’s always rewarding too, is to really see what you’ve done, the changes that you’ve made in the practice, like and I’m going to talk about this later on, too. It’s like having passion and, you know, certain leadership and just getting satisfaction from what it is that you do. And I’ll tell you that at Crystal Clear, we love what we do.
Terri Seymour: It’s awesome.
Thomas Couture: Yeah, we love serving our clients just like we want them to do a great job at serving their patients, providing them more services as well.
Terri Seymour: Well, thank you for stopping by to talk to me.
Thomas Couture: It’s been great. We, I’ve enjoyed this and enjoyed meeting you and.
Terri Seymour: I enjoyed meeting you on your stand as well.
Thomas Couture: I know, I know.
Terri Seymour: Got a little bit of behind the scenes.
Thomas Couture: And we love Aesthetic Everything. You know, we have a great relationship with Vanessa and she’s been wonderful. We actually just made Inc500 last year. We came in at 210.
Terri Seymour: Congratulations.
Thomas Couture: So that’s a very, very big accomplishment for the team.
Terri Seymour: You have lots to celebrate.
Thomas Couture: You know we’ve got great people, we’ve got great people that work really, really hard for our clients and it’s an honor for that designation. We actually did it again this year, didn’t come in at 210, but to make it two years in a row in that list is pretty impressive, but we love what we do. So that’s what makes it so much fun. It’s so easy to do it. So the easiest way to find us is www.crystalcleardm.com or @crystalcleardm is our handle as well for Instagram.
Terri Seymour: Now we know where to find you.
Thomas Couture: Yeah, come to the website, just come to crystalcleardm.com and the experience will speak for itself and you’ll end up filling out a contact form or calling us and that’s the whole point of having a website.
