6 Steps to Success

With a plethora of PALs available today, strategically curating your offering will help build your staff members’ confidence in their own ability to select the perfect pair to suit each patient. 

An enhanced visual experience for patients helps reduce the incidence of nonadapts and fosters an engaging customer journey that can solidify a lasting and trustworthy relationship between eyecare professional and patient. 

Here, we look at a few smart strategies for the successful selection of progressive addition lenses.

▶Step #1: Simplify Your Selection.

The first step in strategically presenting PAL lenses is to simplify the selection. When you are building your own optical’s portfolio of PAL lens offerings, select a mix that represents a full spectrum of materials, coatings, and features such as polarization and photochromic functionality. Additionally, consider lens choices that boast key factors such as ease of adaptation, layout, and corridor options. You have the opportunity to choose lenses from across different brands that meet different needs. 

Having access to a curated cache of products helps eyecare professionals avoid getting stuck in a rut of offering the same product to each and every patient. It also limits the chance of patient overload when too many options are presented—and the chance that the easiest choice becomes no choice at all.

▶Step #2: Review the Rx.

A review of the prescription is an ECP’s first step in the PAL presentation process—and one that should take place prior to frame selection, as well. An ECP can deduce valuable information simply from the Rx add power. If this step is skipped, a PAL style could be recommended that is not a suitable option for the wearer and the ECP can be forced to backtrack, a foible that could cause confidence to falter for both the patient and the ECP.

▶Step #3: Learn the Lifestyle.

Once you know a patient’s prescription needs, the next step is to learn about their lifestyle needs. Ask your patient to walk you through their typical day. Some questions you could ask are:

Do you work from home? 

Do you drive to work or do you take public transportation? 

Do you do one task for most of the day or have a job that keeps you moving around all day? 

How many hours a day do you spend on digital devices? What type of devices do you use?

Are there times throughout the day when you feel your glasses aren’t working for you?

Is this your first pair of progressive lenses?

What do you do after work or on days off? 

Listen and ask questions along the way to further uncover the patient’s daily behavior. As an eyecare professional, uncovering a patient’s visual behavior in relation to lifestyle can be achieved only when you ask the right questions. 

If you can have a patient articulate their visual behavior—and describe at which points their current lenses aren’t meeting their needs—your PAL presentation can be personalized with the specific activities and individual wants of the patient. This focus adds value to the recommendation of the PAL style and further leads the purchase from a cost-based one to a needs-based decision. 

▶Step #4: Offer Basic to Best.

Classifying your PAL offerings into a strategic “basic/good/better/best” format streamlines the selection process but still gives the patient the opportunity to be involved in the decision-making.  

This is a simple and easy way to present the differences between PAL lenses: Beginning always with the recommendation of the best style, the eyecare professional can educate patients on the features and benefits. This type of presentation of lenses also doesn’t slander any tier of PAL lens style, ensuring that patients who have budget constraints are still getting a lens that meets their Rx requirements. 

▶Step #5: Educate Yourself.

Finally, confidence is key when presenting PAL lenses—when an ECP has the right knowledge and terminology, they can flawlessly make a recommendation that explains why some progressive lenses are superior to others. 

Connecting your patient to the vision benefits and lifestyle needs of different PAL lens styles ensures that the correct product is being selected. Familiarizing yourself with the terminology that a lens vendor is using in their pamphlets or marketing material equips you with consumer-friendly phrasing and makes for a consistent and cohesive conversation regardless of which ECP in the practice a patient is engaging with.

▶Step #6: Wrap It Up With Aids.

Using tools such as dispensing mats, manufacturer videos, and new digital aids like virtual reality goggles to show images and examples of a PAL’s layout or peripheral distortion in lens style—from basic to top tier—is a quick and easy way to mitigate expectations of the wearer experience in different PAL styles. 

It’s clear that the optical experience is elevated when the eye-care professional streamlines the process and delivers an educated presentation of PAL solutions strategically tailored to the patient’s individual lifestyle needs.