Improving Online Reviews

 Competition in the healthcare space is tougher than it has ever been. With so many options available to patients, it makes sense that they look online to find the best services available to them. For clinics and hospital systems this can be great - so long as you have good reviews and a positive online reputation. 

Why it matters 

Word-of-mouth advertising is one of the most important forms of advertising in healthcare. Unfortunately, when it comes to online reviews, word-of-mouth advertising can have an incredibly negative impact. Overall, people are more likely to leave negative reviews than positive ones. In recent years, people who had a negative experience were 10 times more likely to leave a negative review than a person with a positive experience leaving a positive review. 

Surveys conducted by reviewtrackers revealed that 94 percent of customers avoided a business because of bad reviews, and over 80 percent don’t really trust businesses that don't have at least 4-star (out of 5) rating. Unfortunately, many clinics and health systems have found that when they started looking online to market their business, they already had a negative online reputation. So now instead of trying to market and grow their business, they end up trying to do “damage control”.  This has become a costly factor, considering that professional online reputation management can cost between $2,000 to $20,000 per month, and can take upwards of a year to get under control. Since more people are willing to leave negative reviews than positive ones, it makes it incredibly difficult to balance these reviews. In fact, some places have tried to “buy” positive reviews but are quickly found out and their reputation is hurt even more. 

What you can do to help

If your clinic or health system has experienced having negative reviews, there are a few things you can do. First, take the reviews to heart. Listen to what your patients are saying. Then, respond to them. Oftentimes, when people leave a negative review, they are also wanting a representative from the business to respond to their review and make it right. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen. Another thing you can do is leave something in your lobby encouraging your patients to provide you feedback about their visit. Being transparent and letting your patients know that you want to hear their feedback (good or bad) can help the patient see that what they think matters to you, and that you honestly want to provide the best care to your patients. 

What else you can do

That being said - the best thing you can do is to prevent the negative reviews from happening altogether. Health systems that have invested in customer service training, have found that overall their reviews are better and usually very positive. Most of the time, a patient's complaint has nothing to do with their treatment, but rather with service, and oftentimes service from someone other than their doctor. Patients don’t mind waiting a long time, as long as someone communicates with them that there will be a wait, and why. They care less about being passed around from person to person, as long as someone is keeping them informed on why and letting them know what to expect. In a patient-centric health system that invests in customer service training, these “service” issues are much more rare, and oftentimes, quickly mitigated and made right. Another factor is when a health system invests into customer service training, they usually put these practices into place not just at the clinic but online as well.  Responding to reviews (positive and negative) creates a really great form of communication to the patients and builds a better reputation with the community as a whole. 

The best part is that customer service training costs much less than online reputation management. Not to mention the fact that instead of just providing a great online reputation to get people in the door, it provides accountability and cultivates an atmosphere that keeps your patients coming back. 

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Don’t compare yourself to others, compare yourself to the organization you were yesterday!

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