Customer Support

How to run nps and csat surveys as Independent Clinic Owner-Operators

Customer SupportFor Independent Clinic Owner-Operators2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You know you should be sending NPS surveys after a patient's third visit and CSAT after a new-patient intake, but right now it's a manual process — or it doesn't happen at all. Your front desk queues it up in a Google Form when they remember, exports responses to a spreadsheet nobody updates, and by the time you see the data it's three months old and two staff members have turned over. Your EHR (Jane, SimplePractice, Kareo) doesn't have a built-in feedback loop that ties scores back to provider, appointment type, or insurance payer. You're flying blind on patient satisfaction in a market where one Google review shapes a new-patient's decision.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Customer SupportFor Independent Clinic Owner-Operators2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An automated survey workflow that sends NPS messages after the third visit and CSAT messages within 24 hours of intake appointments — triggered by your calendar data, no front-desk memory required.

A live dashboard that shows NPS score by provider, CSAT by appointment type, and a rolling 90-day trend — so you can see which provider's patients are the most satisfied and which intake experience is losing people.

A flagging system that surfaces any detractor response (NPS 0–6) within the hour and drafts a recovery email so you can reach out before the patient posts a one-star review.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Google Calendar data on a schedule to identify completed appointments and trigger survey sends. Gmail is connected so Starch can send survey emails and receive replies on your behalf — Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and can send outbound. Response data is logged into a Starch-built patient satisfaction tracker (CRM-style, structured around patient, provider, appointment type, and score). The detractor-flag workflow uses the Email Triage app to surface urgent responses and draft recovery replies. If your EHR has a patient-facing portal or contact form that's web-accessible, Starch can automate reading submission data through your browser — no EHR API required.

Prompts to copy

Build me an NPS survey workflow: after a patient completes their third appointment, send them a one-question email survey asking 'How likely are you to recommend our clinic to a friend or family member?' on a 0–10 scale. Log their score and any comments into a patient satisfaction tracker. Tag them as Promoter (9–10), Passive (7–8), or Detractor (0–6). If they're a Detractor, flag me immediately and draft a personal follow-up email from me.

Create a CSAT survey that goes out within 24 hours of any new-patient intake appointment. Ask: 'How would you rate your experience with us today?' (1–5 stars) and one open field for comments. Pull appointment completions from my Google Calendar each morning and send to anyone who had an intake yesterday. Log responses in the patient satisfaction tracker alongside their provider name and appointment type.

Build me a satisfaction dashboard that shows: current NPS score, NPS breakdown by provider, average CSAT score by appointment type (intake vs. follow-up vs. telehealth), and a 90-day rolling trend chart. Pull from the patient satisfaction tracker and refresh daily.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Google Calendar to Starch (scheduled sync). Starch will pull completed appointments each morning — it reads event titles, attendees, and appointment types so it knows an 'Intake - New Patient' from a 'Follow-up - 30min'.

2 Connect Gmail to Starch (scheduled sync). This is how survey emails go out and how patient replies come back in. The OAuth consent screen will show the underlying connector name — Starch-verified branding is on the roadmap.

3 Tell Starch to build the patient satisfaction tracker: a CRM-style app with fields for patient name, email, provider, appointment type, visit count, NPS score, CSAT score, verbatim comments, and a Promoter/Passive/Detractor tag. Start from the CRM app and describe the schema you need.

4 Set up the visit-count trigger: 'Each morning, check my Google Calendar for completed appointments from the past 7 days. Cross-reference the patient satisfaction tracker. If a patient's third appointment just completed, queue them for an NPS survey email.'

5 Set up the intake trigger: 'Each morning, check my Google Calendar for appointments completed yesterday where the event title includes Intake or New Patient. Queue those patients for a CSAT survey email if they haven't already received one.'

6 Draft both survey emails in plain language — an NPS email with the 0–10 scale question and a reply-based response capture, and a CSAT email with a 1–5 rating. Keep them short: three sentences of context, one question, a thank-you line. Starch helps you draft; you approve the templates once.

7 Set up the Detractor flag automation: 'When a patient replies to an NPS survey with a score of 6 or below, immediately send me a Slack message or email alert with their name, score, and any comments. Draft a personal recovery email from me that acknowledges their experience and offers a call.'

8 Build the satisfaction dashboard: NPS score (current and 90-day trend), provider breakdown (which of your three providers has the highest and lowest scores), CSAT by appointment type, and a running list of open Detractor responses that haven't been followed up yet.

9 Set up a weekly digest: 'Every Monday at 8am, send me a summary of last week's NPS and CSAT responses — total count, score distribution, any Promoter comments worth using as testimonials, and any Detractors still unresolved.'

10 Optionally, if your EHR's patient portal is web-accessible, Starch can automate checking for any patient-submitted feedback forms through your browser — no EHR API needed — and pull those responses into the same tracker so scores are in one place.

11 Review the first two weeks of data together with your front desk. Adjust the appointment-type matching logic in the trigger if your calendar naming conventions differ (e.g., your intake events are titled 'Eval' instead of 'Intake').

12 Once Promoter responses are flowing in, set up a follow-on automation: 'When a patient scores 9 or 10, send them a follow-up email three days later thanking them and including a direct link to your Google Business Profile review page.'

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Ridgeline Family Clinic — Q1 2026 NPS rollout (3-provider practice, 280 active patients)

Sample numbers from a real run

NPS surveys sent (Jan–Mar 2026)	94
Responses received	61
Response rate	65
Promoters (9–10)	41
Passives (7–8)	13
Detractors (0–6)	7
NPS score (net)	56
Detractor recovery emails sent within 2 hours	7
Patients retained after Detractor outreach	5

Ridgeline is a three-provider family clinic — two MDs and one NP — running on SimplePractice. Before Starch, the owner-operator (Dr. Okafor) had no structured feedback process. She assumed satisfaction was high because cancellations were low. In January she connected Google Calendar and Gmail to Starch and described the NPS workflow above. By end of Q1, 94 surveys had gone out automatically after patients' third visits — zero front-desk involvement. 61 came back (65% response rate, far above the industry average of 20–30% for paper or kiosk surveys). NPS came out to 56, which Dr. Okafor found instructive: the NP's patients scored a 71 average, while one MD's patients scored a 38. The open comments on the lower-scoring provider clustered around wait times and rushed consultations — something no dashboard had surfaced before. Seven detractors received a personal email from Dr. Okafor within two hours of responding; five rebooked. Two of the Promoter responses became Google reviews after the automated follow-up email sent them a direct review link. The whole setup took one afternoon to configure and has run without manual input since.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net Promoter Score by provider (rolling 90 days) — because you need to know if the issue is clinic-wide or one clinician's patient experience

CSAT score by appointment type (intake vs. follow-up) — intake CSAT below 4.0 is a front-desk or onboarding problem, not a clinical one

Survey response rate — below 30% usually means the email isn't landing or the timing is off; above 50% means patients feel engaged enough to reply

Detractor response time — how quickly you reach out after a 0–6 score; under 4 hours correlates with patient retention

Promoter-to-review conversion rate — what percentage of 9–10 scorers actually leave a Google or Healthgrades review after the automated follow-up

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

SurveyMonkey + manual Gmail blast

SurveyMonkey gives you good survey design but no trigger logic — someone still has to export the patient list, segment by visit count, and send manually every week; responses don't auto-log anywhere useful.

Birdeye or NiceJob (reputation management platforms)

Both are built specifically for healthcare review generation and do it well, but they're priced for multi-location groups (~$300–600/month) and don't connect to your internal satisfaction data or let you query 'show me my lowest-scoring provider' in plain language.

Typeform + Zapier + Airtable

A capable DIY stack if you have a few hours to wire it up, but you're managing three tools, multiple Zaps, and a schema you designed yourself — and when SimplePractice changes something, you're debugging it alone.

Your EHR's built-in patient satisfaction module (Jane, Kareo, etc.)

If your EHR has one at all, it typically surfaces aggregate scores only and doesn't let you filter by provider, flag detractors in real time, or connect to Gmail for follow-up automation.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, founder inbox all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My patients are older and don't respond well to digital surveys. Can I adjust the channel or timing?

Yes — you describe the logic. If you know your 65+ cohort responds better to a phone follow-up than email, you can tell Starch: 'For patients over 65, instead of sending an NPS email, add them to a weekly call list I review on Mondays.' The trigger and action are both configurable in plain language.

Can Starch pull patient contact info directly from SimplePractice or Jane?

Starch connects to apps in its integration catalog (3,000+ apps) and can reach any web-based portal through browser automation. If SimplePractice or Jane has a web-accessible patient list or export, Starch can automate pulling from it through your browser — no formal API required. That said, patient data handling has compliance implications: confirm your BAA situation before connecting any PHI-adjacent workflow.

Is Starch HIPAA-compliant? Should I be running patient names through it?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. For workflows that involve identifiable patient health information, you should consult with your compliance advisor before connecting PHI. Many clinic owners run these surveys using only names and email addresses (not clinical data), which is a lower-risk starting point. Starch is honest about this limit — it's not the right tool for clinical documentation or anything requiring a signed BAA with a certified vendor.

What happens if a patient replies to the survey with something that sounds like a clinical concern?

The detractor-flag workflow can be configured to watch for keywords — words like 'pain,' 'worse,' 'emergency' — and route those replies to you immediately with a different priority tag than a standard low-score flag. You define what warrants immediate escalation; Starch watches for it.

Can Starch send the follow-up Google review request automatically?

Yes. Starch can automate sending a follow-up email to any Promoter (9–10 scorer) three days after their NPS response, including a direct link to your Google Business Profile review page. Starch can reach your Google Business Profile through browser automation — no API needed. You write the email template once; Starch sends it on schedule.

I already have some patient satisfaction data in a Google Sheet from the past year. Can I bring that in?

Yes — connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live. Tell Starch: 'Import this sheet into the patient satisfaction tracker and map the columns to provider name, score, date, and comments.' It'll clean up whatever inconsistencies are in there and merge it with the new automated data going forward.