How to maintain a positive online reputation?


 Online comments that patients leave in negative reviews can definitely tarnish the reputation of any dental practice. I should add that most dental practices are making a real effort to help their patients and really want to create and maintain their good will. Even so, nobody's perfect and occasionally things don't go well with a particular patient. Things might be said that shouldn't or a treatment outcome may not meet that patients or the dentists expectations, but that doesn't mean that an occasional negative interaction should be allowed to ruin a dental practice's online reputation.

So how should a practice get a high percentage of 5 star reviews? To maintain a solid online reputation a practice must successfully generate a sufficient number of positive patient reviews. This should be a quantity that will overwhelm a few negative online reviews and make them appear to be the outliers that they actually are. Of course to accomplish this a practice must actually have a high number of grateful and satisfied patients who are willing to go out of their way to leave a detailed positive review on an internet site.

How should a practice generate these reviews? Although most of the online sites actually discourage asking a patient to write a review (Yelp and Google), in my experience a very small minority of satisfied patients will spontaneously write a review that endorses a dental practice. Unfortunately the converse is not true; Unhappy, disappointed or angry patients need no encouragement to write a disparaging review and a very high percentage of them actually do.

Ok, so what should a practice do to help their online reputation. First, all patients should be treated extremely well and should leave satisfied, as much as possible. If they leave and are unhappy, we almost always arrange for a follow up phone call by either me or my office manager. We want to find out why they were unhappy and if there is anything we can do to make them feel better. This call is often enough to smooth over any hard feelings. If there is anything that we did or didn't do that contributed to what made them upset we will acknowledge it and ask if there is anything we can do to make them feel better. If they ask for  something reasonable, we will go along with their request. If it is not reasonable, we may make an alternative suggestion that may help them feel better.

So much for avoiding negative reviews. What about getting positive reviews. The best way is to ask happy, loyal and satisfied patients if they would be willing to write a positive review for our practice. I recommend asking patients who have been coming for five years or more. These patients usually are really knowledgable about our practice and have chosen to return, year after year. Almost all of them have a very positive opinion of our practice and are willing to write a nice review. Of course not every patient asked actually ends up writing a review, but enough do that it is easy to generate enough positive reviews on Yelp and Google to keep our practices rating extremely high and make the negative reviews appear to be the outliers that they actually are!

from Ask Dr. Spindel - http://lspindelnycdds.blogspot.com/2018/08/how-to-maintain-positive-online.html - http://lspindelnycdds.blogspot.com/

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