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/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Help! My Child is Terrified of the Dentist

Image
If you’re the parent of a young child, you know their brains are similar to sponges that soak up everything around them—especially in their first five years, which neuroscientists say is when they’ll do the most learning and developing in their entire life. At this formative time, your child may amaze you with what they notice: your facial expressions, the different tones of your voice, and your habits. If your habits include regular dental visits and an excellent oral hygiene routine, they’ll notice and want to emulate you. If you happen to feel anxious about your dental visits, or you groan when you’ve got to floss and brush, they may synchronize and feel your dread. This could lead to dental fears that stick with them for years—potentially a lifetime! Kids Can Be Courageous If you’re feeling guilty right now, go ahead and put that away as it won’t serve you or your little one. Everyone has some room for improvement, and Coastal Pediatric Dentistry® is here to help show you an...
Read more

Going for the Gold?

Image
On the left is the older allow, on the right the new one that my lab has chosen to use The cost of a penny weight of pure gold is currently $79.53. The cost of a penny weight of pure palladium is $130.6. It used to be that palladium was added instead of gold to the precious metals often used for pfms, but now laboratories are finding that palladium is no longer affordable. The lab that I am using has just changed the formulation of the metal it's using to one that has more gold than palladium. I really do not mind, but metals with more gold are softer and often easier for a dentist to accidentally polish off delicate margins. It is important when polishing "higher gold" formulations to exert less hand pressure when performing the final polishing of the crown's margins. Other wise there should be no problem with this change. Traditionally labs have chosen alloys with higher gold percentages for optimal esthetics, since alloys with higher concentrations of ...
Read more

Lemon Juice – The Good, the Bad, & the Sour

Image
In a great tale of opposites, lemon juice can be both acidic and basic, or alkaline. Read on to find out why people are talking about this, and what it means for your oral and overall health . What is pH and why does it matter? Drinking lemon juice (usually diluted in a glass of water or added to a cup of tea) is a beloved health tonic among fans of natural medicine. Potential benefits include lower cholesterol, lower inflammation in the body, and increased metabolism and energy. Lemon also contains high levels of antioxidants and vitamin C that boost your immune system. On a scale from 0-14, a pH of 7 is neutral (pure water) while numbers below 7 are acidic (unhealthy), and above 7 are basic or alkaline (healthy). Believers in holistic health blame many ailments on the body’s pH being too low or too acidic. Increasing your body’s pH is called “alkalizing.” Lemon juice in its natural state is acidic with a pH of about 2, but once metabolized it actually becomes alkaline with a pH ...
Read more