It’s a fact. Online consumer dental reviews have a strong influence on consumer behavior, with nearly half of Americans saying they’re more likely to visit a business or use a service provider after reading a positive online review.
Websites like Yelp, Google Places, Angie’s List and City Search have become an archive of opinions and information that can have a very real effect on small businesses – both positive and negative. But many business owners are unsure of how to respond to negative reviews or make the most of positive ones. How does your practice manage dental reviews? Dental reviews can be a great source of traffic to your practice, use these tips to help you manage your dental reviews.
Here are five easy tips for managing dental reviews:
Keep Track of What Patients Are Saying
Monitor review websites to track when and how your dental practice is mentioned. Google Alerts is free, takes just seconds to set up and will let you know every time your name is mentioned online. You can also subscribe to a reputation management company to monitor your mentions. And some review sites automatically send you an e-mail when new reviews are posted.
Generate More Quality Reviews
Patients lead busy lives and often won’t take the time post a review unless you ask them to directly, which can seem like you’re suggesting they “say nice things about you.” Instead, subscribe to an online service like PracticeMojo that automatically e-mails your patients after an appointment to request they submit a review. You’ll see the number of reviews increase dramatically.
Make Your Reputation Known
Add a “read reviews” button to your website and all social media pages to encourage patients to both read and write reviews. Create a separate web page that lists your reviews, or links directly to your practice’s profile on review sites. You can also add links to reviews in your dental practice newsletter or e-mail promotions and even pull snippets of your best reviews to use in print promotions. PracticeMojo is useful tool for generating, monitoring and utilizing the power of positive online reviews.
Accentuate the Positive
Because you’re looking for real, honest feedback, there’s a chance that at some point you may receive a negative review. Before this happens, establish a policy for how you plan to respond and give someone the duties of “spokesperson” for your dental practice. If a negative review appears and you have access to the reviewer’s contact information, respond quickly via an e-mail or phone call to find out why they were dissatisfied, and offer solutions on how to remedy the situation. If you’re unable to communicate with them directly or the patient rejects your offer to make things right, craft and post a public response to the review explaining how you offered to resolve the situation. Your honesty and candor will go a long way in speaking for the integrity of your practice.
Automation Makes it Easier
Get help from the experts. PracticeMojo™ uses more than 40 years of dental practice marketing experience to help practices just like yours recruit, retain and reactivate patients by contacting them automatically via e-mail, text and postcard messaging. Plus, your PracticeMojo subscription includes a free premium subscription to Rate-a-Dentist.com, which helps you manage your online reviews by getting them to show upon your website, Facebook page, in Google search results an much more.
With Google requiring its reviewers to join Google+, it’s getting harder to get real reviews.
And Yelp is just plain dishonest in its review management – I’ve had 4 legitimate reviews filtered out.
Getting tougher out there :)
Thanks a lot , this blog provides very useful information for us, dentists!
Nice blog. It’s very natural that we expect positive feedback but always be ready to face negative also.
I agree with the previous commenter who mentioned that it is getting more difficult for patients to create online reviews. We ask for reviews from patients who have been very positive and complimentary and we send a direct link to where to write the review. Even with that, many patients do not take the time to write reviews or the review sites block the reviews. That being said, many of our patients mention our reviews as the reason they scheduled and felt more at ease coming into the office for the first time.
Good article. The problem with google alerts is that it does not alert you when you get a review on a review websites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Yahoo Local or any of the others. You can sign up free @ ReviewAlert.com and get an email alert whenever someone reviews you online.