Seems the Journal of applied business research (JABR) has done some extensive research through their paper entitled:
‘International Tourists’ Service Quality Perception And Behavioural Loyalty Toward Medical Tourism In Bangkok Metropolitan Area’
This research was done to find out that customer loyalty comes from treating your clients well.
God knows how much this boring and over intelligent use of English cost to do, but the findings were: Be nice to your customers and they will return, go figure!
If they’d have given me 50,000 USD (probably what this cost!) I would hang around clinics like BNH (where most of these respondents were from!?) and grab 400 foreigners to Thailand with bandages round their face and ask them what was important about their procedures.
The tourists were asked to rank several factors in order of what they thought was best amongst the categories:
Medical quality
Value of services
Safety and security
Location
International patient marketing
International patient management
Attention to needs of patient
Transparency
The results were after reading it several times and then converted it from pointless over use of big words and long sentences to something we can try to understand, Sorry to make this into an English lesson, but what on Earth does this mean?:
“Service quality has a positive relationship with value, satisfaction, and brand trust -which also has direct impact on medical tourists’ behavioral loyalty. In addition, value, satisfaction, and brand trust have an effect on the relationship between service quality and behavioral loyalty.”????
*yes spelling mistakes left in*
I think what they are trying to say is that Thailand does well in this market because the Thais are by nature a very hospitable nation, and people want to feel cared for when they are going under the knife. So by making the patient feel relaxed getting to know the staff and the Doctor and letting the patient know exactly what’s going to happen and how they will feel, giving full details about where they are going and what happens afterwards and after care is paramount to success in the field of Cosmetic surgery, and this is the most elementary form of brand building as clients rate the ‘care factor’ as high as the procedure itself, and will talk about it wherever they go to their peers.
It appears by this hugely researched and expensive article that many surgeons need to understand that bedside manner is as important as their scalpel skills!


















