By Griffin Jones
Yikes.
It’s no different than what many of us do when choosing a new hair salon or restaurant, they search online.
Years ago online reviews of doctors were scarce, and even fewer considered trustworthy, but times have changed.
According to a survey from MobiHealthNews, 95% of U.S. adults believed online ratings and reviews to be reliable. Even more interesting, 70% of those surveyed said online ratings influenced their choice of doctor.
With the increase in prevalence and weight of online reviews, today it’s more important than ever to take action and proactively manage your clinic’s reputation by following the 5 steps to improving your fertility clinic’s online reputation.
Provide Concierge Service
Claim & Maintain Listings
Request Reviews
Manage Reviews
Market Reviews
Let’s break down each component.
1). Provide Concierge Level of Service 100% of the time
While putting systems and services in place to improve and maintain an online reputation is necessary, your clinic must first have a concierge level of service written into the fabric of its DNA. The clinic leadership team must have an unwavering commitment to offering a concierge-level of service at every turn, and mandating its employees to do the same.
Offering concierge-level service is thinking about the small things and asking yourself, What Can I Do To Remove The Patient’s Pain In This Moment? Examples include, but are not limited to:
Using the patient’s name during conversation
Having call center / new patient coordinators use the patient’s name immediately
Always remaining calm and using a pleasant tone of voice
Providing patients with support/messages of hope during the two-week wait.
If this belief and level of customer service is not woven into the fabric of your culture or expressed within you as a physician, it will affect how your staff treats their patients.
2). Claim & Maintain Listings
Once offering the concierge level of service has been addressed, the next step is to organize your listings. Local Listings are a directory with your business's key information. When people search for your business (or the service you provide), your listing is usually displayed in the search results. The most important listings are:
Google My Business (GMB)
Physicians should be tied to the clinic listing, but owned by the physician
Each clinic location should have a listing, including satellites so reviews can be left
Facebook
Yelp
Yelp is important because it is also integrated with other listings sites, like Bing and Apple Maps
Fertility IQ
Fertility IQ has skyrocketed as an influencer platform over the last few years, and the length, depth, and detail of the reviews have it becoming a recognized source of patients’ trust.
Once Google & Facebook are at a minimum of 4.5 and 60+ reviews, begin to focus on Yelp & FertilityIQ
3). Request Reviews
Patients will always leave reviews when left up to their own devices, but if you want to achieve and maintain a rating of 4.5 and above, you need to be proactive about asking and automating review requests.
Asking
When you’ve treated patients right, they want to help you. Therefore, ask the right patient for a review and give yourself and your staff permission to do it. While verbal requests are necessary, asking also includes creating marketing materials that advertise where to leave reviews and post the requests on social media. Bottom line: Don’t be afraid to ask with the right patient! In your waiting room, use video to ask satisfied patients to like you on Facebook, rate you on Yelp, or fill out a patient satisfaction survey. Seek patients who give your practice high marks and ask them if they’d be willing to give you a testimonial.
Automation
Using a service that automates repeat requests to reviews and pushes them to the four most important platforms in Reproductive Medicine (Google, Facebook, Yelp, FertilityIQ). The software element helps ensure the patient is reminded and the review is pushed to the platform where you need it most.
4). Manage Reviews
It’s critical to respond to 100% of reviews - both positive and negative. While it’s also helpful to have a foundation of scripts to utilize so that responding on every platform is not tedious, slight customization is necessary to ensure the consumer’s needs are being addressed. Something as simple as “Thank you for your feedback. We’re committed to a better patient experience and are in the process of reevaluating all staff communication” will show the patient you take their feedback seriously. And to the prospective patient who hasn’t yet chosen your practice, it lessens the harshness of the review.
5). Market Reviews
You’re collecting the reviews, now it’s critical to share the positive patient feedback with other prospective patients still in the decision-making phases. Our internal data shows that at least 50% of patients will conduct an online search of the clinic, often landing on your website, to evaluate a practice. Highlight positive reviews and testimonials right on your home page so they aren’t missed. And if your center does not have amazing, professional patient testimonials that blow folks away, it’s time to get that changed right now by consulting with the creative team at Fertility Bridge.
By taking charge of your online reputation, you will impact the number of new patient appointments, retrievals and ultimately, revenue.
If you’d like Fertility Bridge’s help in improving your online reputation, we can assess your situation in the Goal and Competitive Diagnostic.
