PRACTICE MANAGEMENT | ONLINE REPUTATION | consumers rely on ratings and reviews
to select their doctors and to rule out the ones they do not want to visit. In the digital world, consumers are inclined to speak their minds and share their opinions about your practice, whether they are fair or not. Historically, unhappy patients tend to be the most vocal, while the happy ones may never tell a soul about how good your work is. There is nothing really new about doctors being rating and reviewed by patients. They used to be whispered in the ladies room at the country club, or discussed at the mall over tuna salad. The big difference is that these critiques were not online in a public forum for the entire world to see. No matter how good you are as a
physician, you are bound to get some snide remarks about your fees, complaints about waiting, or your attitude at some point, especially if you have a busy practice. It is just the nature of a service business. The more patients you treat, the higher your chances of having some who are not your biggest fans and are prone to spread the word. In reality, no practice can have 100% happy patients, despite your best efforts. Regrettably, ratings sites and social media platforms have become the logical place for patients and customers to vent and air their grievances. They are the first port of call for spite-based attacks on your professional reputation. Patients know this and some of them will use it as a weapon. However, consumers are becoming
more skeptical of reviews and they look for red flags. They no longer trust doctors who have hundreds of glowing reviews that sound as if they were written by a publicist. It’s all about the ratio of good to bad. For example, if you have a mix of reviews yet the negative ones are focused on a particular topic or recurring theme, you might want to look at that more closely. Perhaps you are a little arrogant in the consultation, or your front desk staff are not always as welcoming as they should be. Address these kinds of issues when they arise to turn them around. It can be a very humbling exercise to read what people are writing about you. Patient ratings are the new word-of-mouth.
What not to do By now you should be keeping tabs of online critiques leveled against your reputation. Set alerts on Google and Yahoo, and assign a staff member to
48
watch what is being posted on all relevant sites and social networking platforms. If you are extremely OCD, you can
consider enlisting an external monitoring service to help alert you to any new developments, such as reposts of negative content and any derivative attacks that appear in response, so you can be proactive. For example, sites like Brandseye. com and
Rankur.com offer extensive tools to analyze your online reputation but these services are costly and probably overkill for a solo practitioner. Management of negative online content
can take many forms. Some approaches help distill an unflattering or defamatory post, while others can backfire significantly and escalate a situation. The last thing you
please stop yourself. This is the time for cooler minds to prevail. A response from the physician can be seen as defensive, which readers can easily misconstrue as arrogance. In my view and many others, physicians should avoid entering into any potentially negative conversations online. Your office staff can respond for the practice using the ‘we’ voice. You may consider drafting a post that is very general without acknowledging any doctor-patient relationship, or risk of stirring the pot further. For example; 'Thank you for expressing your concerns. Please contact our office to discuss this further. We would be happy to hear from you.' Your Administrator or Manager can try to respond to the poster with some form of
Common complaints and causes for negative reviews often center on long waiting times, customer service, a rushed staff, the doctor
didn’t spend enough time, the feeling that the practice was too busy, overcharging for services, the perception that the fees are too high, and the ubiquitous bedside manner.
want is to stimulate one comment and have it spread like Poison Ivy into a chain of comments. The worst thing you can do is to react in
a defensive or aggressive manner. It is important to try and maintain a calm, rational, and reasonable approach at all times, even when the patient is completely unreasonable. When negative posts show up, doctors
often tend to take it very personally, which is understandable. In general, the best approach is: less is more. You can do more harm than good by opening up a dialogue and engaging with consumers in a public forum. Whenever possible, keep your emotions out of it. If you are inclined to respond,
August/September 2015 |
prime-journal.com
an offer to continue the dialogue. The next step is to take the matter offline to continue the dialogue in the hopes of arriving at a resolution. In this way, you have demonstrated that you stand behind your reputation and pay attention to situations flagged in public forums. You can then privately try to resolve the conflict, assuming that the post is actually a real patient with a valid issue. Common complaints and causes for
negative reviews often center on long waiting times, customer service, a rushed staff, the doctor didn’t spend enough time, the feeling that the practice was too busy, overcharging for services, the perception that the fees are too high, and the ubiquitous bedside manner.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64