Client attendance and retention rates both represent important figures that can reveal a lot about the health of your private practice, including:
- Your internal policies and workflow,
- Your relationship with your client base, and
- Gaps in the performance of your practice.
And as they both relate to how the clients interact with your practice, they can be confusing to distinguish. However, the client attendance rate and client retention rate are vastly different metrics that measure different aspects of your business.
Below are their simple definitions and main differences.
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Client Attendance Rate
The client attendance rate is concerned with:
- A session-by-session attendance pattern of a client over time, or
- The average attendance rate of a group of clients for a specific period.
This figure is telling of how your clients interact with each of their sessions – i.e., whether they honour the sessions on a case-by-case scenario.
Client Retention Rate
The client retention rate is concerned with:
- The lifetime of a client’s journey with your practice, or
- The average lifetime of a group of clients within specific parameters.
As opposed to the client attendance rate, client retention looks at how a client interacts with their multi-session treatment plan as a whole.
What does this all mean?
A client can have a high attendance record but a low retention. Say you recommended (approximately) 10 sessions for a client’s treatment plan. They attended 4 sessions without any reschedules or cancellations. Then, they didn’t agree to book their 5th session and effectively terminated their own treatment.
This client has a 100% attendance rate, while the retention rate for them is only 40%.
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