5 Steps To Improving Your Fertility Clinic’s Online Reputation

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.

1. Provide Concierge Service

2. Claim & Maintain Listings

3. Request Reviews

4. Manage Reviews

5. 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.

Don't Lose New Fertility Patients Before the First Visit: 9 Steps of IVF Center Lead Conversion

By Griffin Jones and Stephanie Linder

“Marketing throws the ball, but the practice has to catch it,”--Rita Gruber.

Digital marketing and physician referrals lead prospective fertility patients to contact you. Then what?

They move into the second phase of the Fertility Patient Marketing Journey, Leads (New Patient Inquiries) to Initial Consult. And just because prospective patients have submitted a web form or called the clinic, doesn’t mean they actually book. Let’s look at how to fix that.

You may use the term new patient inquiry instead of lead. They are the same thing. A lead is any phone call, web form, fax or chat requesting a new appointment or seeking information prior to scheduling. 

The way in which your staff responds to the first prospective patient interaction, determines the conversion to initial consultation.  If you don’t have the right processes and properly trained people, you lose new patients before they even schedule. 

And the point isn’t just to get them in the door, either.

Positive and negative patient experiences start at the first point of contact - often a phone call or the response to a web form/chat.  Expectations and rapport are built and broken from the very beginning. 

Fertility Bridge estimates that as many as 20% of negative fertility center reviews come from people who haven't yet had a consult. Patient dissatisfaction is often a result of unmet expectations that weren’t set early in the process.

MEASURING CONVERSION % FROM FERTILITY PATIENT INQUIRY TO INITIAL CONSULTATION

Two key performance indicators (KPI) measure how well your fertility center converts leads.

1)  Total # New Patient Appointment

2). Lead conversion % 

Lead Conversion % = New Patient Appointment / Total Leads 

One individual must be accountable for these KPIs.

The Lead Conversion System 

At least 50% of your leads should be converted to appointments.  If it’s less than 50%, you must analyze and revise your system immediately.  This is the system to increase that percentage. 

1. Dedicate a new patient line

2. Have a specialized new patient scheduling team

3. Unify scheduling across offices and providers

4. Answer the Phone

5. Offer the appointment 

6. Book shortest wait list 

7. Respond to voicemails and web forms within specified time 

8. Record Lead Interaction

9. Clearly identify next steps 

1) Dedicate New Patient Line and Form

Current fertility patients and prospective fertility patients have different needs. Having a phone line and an online request appointment form that separates new patient inquiries from current patient call backs allows your staff to better manage both patient types. 

2) Specialized New Patient Scheduling Team

Multi-tasking is detrimental to both lead conversion and patient satisfaction. It can cause frustration when a front desk person has to schedule a new patient call, fetch a medical record, and check in a consult simultaneously.

A dedicated role or team also decreases voicemails, unanswered phone calls and hangups. It reduces the time required for your staff to play phone tag and increases new appointments booked.

3) Unify Scheduling across offices and providers

When prospective patients have to be transferred from (or worse, hang up and call) one office to another, they often do call…another fertility center.  Your new patient call center is responsible for booking every office equally based on availability without preference to an assigned office or doctor.   

4) Answer The Phone

Missed calls are a great source of new patient appointments...for another fertility center. They are also as good for your patient’s experience as your cable company’s phone tree is for you.  Make a plan to hire the adequate number of staff and use data to ensure coverage during the busiest days/hours. 

5) Offer the appointment 

When prospective patients call with questions, most staff members answer the question at face value and go no further.  In order to increase conversion, mandate your staff “ask for the appointment” at least once with every prospective patient, regardless of the question being asked. Consistently offering and asking for the appointment makes an immediate impact on your KPIs, costs $0, and is a process that can be implemented today.  

6) Book Shortest Waitlist 

The longer the wait, the higher the risk of lost appointments, cancellations, and no-shows.

In a multi-physician group, when your waitlist is longer than 4 weeks it is the role of the call center to suggest a doctor with a shorter waitlist. 

Your call center won’t offer earlier slots with a different physician than requested without your blessing. Some docs cringe at this idea. Make sure your staff knows it’s OK and that the most important part is that the patient stay in your clinic ecosystem.  Do you want to be a single provider or do you want to be a practice owner? 

7) Respond to all voicemails and digital inquiries

Avoid being nailed by a negative review that comes from people who’ve never even seen you for a consultation.  Set specific expectations of call back time on your online contact forms’ thank you pages and voicemail. The sooner you respond the better, but you must be able to exceed the expectation. It’s far better for their perception of you to say “you will hear back from us in 72 hours” and get back to them in 48 than to say “you will hear back from us in 24 hours” and get back to them in 36.

You should always follow up more than once, but the cadence of lead nurturing is a topic for another article.

8) Record Lead Interaction

Document your interactions in a customer relationship management software (CRM). Using this data will help you identify drop off, automate follow up, and nurture prospective patients with helpful information.

9) Clearly Identify Next Steps

Before ending the interaction, your new patient team should set three clear expectations about what happens between now and the appointment:

• Welcome Sequence Correspondence

• Medical records and patient portal

• Appt time, correct patient info and acknowledgment of next steps 

CONVERT MORE INQUIRIES TO NEW PATIENTS

We’ve given you an actionable process for converting new fertility patient inquiries to new consultations, but we didn’t talk much about what your team needs to deliver concierge service. How your team responds to these patients is likely even more important than when they do it. 

If you would like Fertility Bridge’s help in improving your fertility center’s lead to new appointment percentage, or how to implement the steps listed above - book a Goal and Competitive Diagnostic meeting below.