Are you actively seeking and monitoring your online patient reviews? If not, you might want to start paying attention. Industry reports state that 99.9% of all consumers read reviews before choosing any given product or service. And 96% of all consumers actively seek negative reviews specifically to help them make a buying decision. So as you can see, online review management is critical to your brand’s reputation and success. Therefore, you might want to consider enlisting the help of a reputation management platform for plastic surgeons.
Managing Your Reputation in Today’s Consumer-Driven World
Your online reputation could literally make or break your business—the business you worked so hard to build. Therefore, establishing and maintaining a positive online reputation is critical to your success. So let’s talk about how to get more positive patient reviews, how to avoid negative patient reviews, and how to use your great online reputation to drive more traffic to your practice and increase your revenue.
Why Online Reviews Are So Important
Statistics show that people put a lot of stock in online reviews and that online reviews weigh heavily on any given buying decision. So current patient reviews are proof to new patients that your practice is reputable and that you offer high-quality products and services.
Additionally, people tend to believe most of the reviews they read on the internet and social media platforms. So that’s even more reason to spend some time monitoring and maintaining your online credibility.
Most patients will search specifically for plastic surgeon reviews before contacting you to make an appointment. If you need further proof of how important online reviews are, ask yourself this: Do you seek out and read online reviews before making your final buying decisions? And what do you do if the reviews you find are negative? Yep! You will probably pass on that option and look for another one…right? Enough said! Let’s move on.
How to Build a 5-Star Reputation While Remaining HIPPA Compliant
HIPPA compliance is required to protect sensitive patient information. The HIPPA Privacy Rule applies to all patients’ personal health information (PHI) and includes more than just a patient’s medical history. It also covers any information that could be used to identify a person for the duration of their treatment.
That includes basic information such as a patient’s name, address, phone number, email address, and birthday. It also includes any current or future appointment dates and times, diagnosis, test results, and insurance information. Keep in mind, however, that patients themselves might disclose their PHI when they leave an online review anywhere on the internet. Therefore, when you post your reply, you must be mindful of your response and continue to adhere to the HIPPAA’s privacy requirements. Otherwise, you could face some hefty fines and possibly litigation.
Rules of Thumb to Follow When It Comes to Responding to Patient Reviews
1. Train Your Staff
Make sure you train your staff to reply to your online reviews appropriately. You are not required to remove the patient’s feedback if it contains PHI; however, you should never respond to the reviewer as a current or prior patient. And your reply should never reiterate the patient’s response that contains any of their PHI.
2. Write Thoughtful Replies
Continue the dialog and always write replies that show your commitment to improving the patient’s experience. You should also let the patient know when you’ve edited any responses you made after the initial input.
3. Follow-Up with Negative Reviews
Follow-up with patients that leave negative reviews. This should not be done via email because you don’t want to incur any fines for emailing patients without their consent.
4. Create Pre-Approved Replies
Create a variety of pre-approved replies that apply to different circumstances. Develop these with your compliance and legal teams. These will make it easier to reply to patient feedback.
5. Don’t Flag Negative Reviews for Removal Unless…
Never flag negative reviews for removal unless they contain vulgar or defamatory remarks. If your practice never has any negative reviews or patient concerns, people will begin to think your reviews are not real.
6. Never Email a Patient Without Their Written Consent
Many places require that you get a person’s written permission before emailing them.
Best Practices for Monitoring and Responding to Patient Reviews
Here are some tips and strategies for monitoring and responding to online patient reviews.
- Best Practices for Positive Reviews
Not all patients will realize how important online reviews are for your practice, so they don’t think about writing a review. Therefore, you should ask them to write a review for you. Ask your patients for reviews that include detailed information such as details about you, your staff, your clinic, the appointment system, and any other information about their experiences with you.
Keep your patient feedback forms short and sweet. If they aren’t easy to complete, your patients might not take the time to fill them out. You should also ask your patients to share their reviews on social media.
When you provide a positive patient experience, patients are generally happy to tell the world. Patient satisfaction results in improved brand reputation and more word-of-mouth traffic.
Patients will be more inclined to provide you with a positive review if you and your team have a good attitude, if you have popular amenities available, and if your products and services are high-quality and affordable.
Always collect and share positive patient feedback. You can post these reviews on your website, social media pages, and on your clinic walls so everyone can see them. Doing so will help potential patients make a final decision about your practice and could motivate them to go ahead and schedule an appointment rather than continue searching for another plastic surgeon.
- Best Practices for Negative Patient Reviews
It’s highly unlikely that you won’t ever receive a negative review or emotionally heated complaints about you or your practice. Many times, such responses are unfounded, so don’t let them get to you. However, if they are justified, look at this feedback as an opportunity to learn and grow.
Always take the time to think about how you are going to respond to a negative comment. Watch your words. You can offer a potential dispute resolution option or compensation if warranted. When a disappointed patient sees you are trying to remedy the situation, they are more likely to change their mind and their negative comments. Additionally, they might even return to your practice and become lifelong patients.
As a plastic surgeon, you should remember that your responses to negative feedback are not just for the patients leaving the feedback. Your responses are also so potential patients trying to find a good plastic surgeon can see that you are willing to listen, are empathetic, take negative feedback seriously, and that you responded promptly. This will allow potential patients to hear both sides of the issue so they can make up their own minds about the situation.
Most people realize that sometimes others just like to rant and rave about something or someone, then they move on to another platform to rant and rave about something or someone else. Knowing that, people are more likely to disregard negative feedback depending on your responses and how you handled them.
How Using a Reputation Management Platform for Plastic Surgeons Can Help
Fortunately, in this day and age, there are plenty of online marketing tools that can help make managing patient feedback much quicker and easier. They can do things like send automated messages for any number of requests and more. Online marketing tools just make it easier for you to communicate with your patients versus having to monitor and manage everything manually.
Would you like to hear about a reputation management platform for plastic surgeons?
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How Surefire Local Can Help You Get More 5-Star Reviews
Surefire Local is an amazing tool that makes it easy to get and manage more 5-star reviews. It works by connecting with top review platforms like Google Business Profile, Facebook, and Yelp. This will enable you to see all your online reviews in one place as a timeline view.
Here are some of the other things you can do.
- Our business intelligence software will send review requests on your behalf to happy patients via text message or email.
- You can then write and post responses to those reviews from within the Surefire Local Marketing Platform.
- Our system will then send reminder emails or text messages to those patients who have already received a request to write a review but haven’t done so yet.
- Using the Surefire Local Marketing Platform will help you eliminate time wasted going from platform to platform checking to see if you have new reviews and responding to any that have already been posted.
- It also helps you measure brand sentiment with a word-cloud graph that shows you the most frequently used words found in your patients’ reviews.
- You can also optimize your brand presence across all review sites and on more than 80 local business directories. This can be done by managing the information found about your business, the photos displayed, any special offers you’re running, and more.
All this and more can be done from a single dashboard on the Surefire Local Marketing Platform.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
Our business intelligence marketing software is extremely affordable and is only a fraction of the cost of other tools out there. Additionally, it is much cheaper than hiring a digital marketing agency to do everything for you. And the best part is that you can perform all nine of these important online marketing activities within one platform.
That means you will save time and money. You won’t spend time jumping from platform to platform and tool to tool. And you won’t be wasting money on marketing agencies when the Surefire Local Marketing Platform makes it so quick and easy for you to do these tasks yourself.
What’s Next?
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