As you seek to grow your chiropractic clinic, one of the most important tools at your disposal is online reviews. According to Healthgrades, 90% of patients will use online reviews when evaluating a healthcare provider, and 80% trust online reviews at the same level they trust personal recommendations. In fact, 77% of patients will start with online reviews when evaluating a medical provider. Your online reviews matter.
So what can you do if your online reviews aren’t what you want them to be? Using an online reputation management platform for chiropractors, like Surefire Local, can help you get control over this important part of your marketing.
Managing Your Reputation in Today’s Customer-Driven World
In the healthcare industry, and especially a targeted industry like chiropractic care, word-of-mouth advertising is one of the most important. People want to know that others have had a positive experience with you as a chiropractor before they will be willing to book an appointment. When they don’t have a personal friend to get a recommendation from in their local area, and sometimes even if they do, most people will look at online reviews before booking any type of medical care with a new provider. Thus, having a solid online reputation with excellent reviews will help you gain more potential patients. Yet, you do need to use caution while building a five-star reputation.
Stay HIPAA Compliant While Building Your Online Reputation
As you seek five-star reviews, make sure you are following HIPAA compliance. This means you cannot share personal data, like name and birthday, or diagnostic and appointment information about your patients. Here are some tips to ensure you don’t accidentally violate HIPPA regulations.
- When replying to online reviews, never reveal that a reviewer is a patient or disclose information about a diagnosis.
- Patients have the freedom to reveal this review information, but even if they do, your response still needs to stay within HIPAA regulations.
- Consider having pre-approved replies to help your staff avoid the risk of HIPAA violations. You can even run these replies through your legal team, and then upload them to your online reputation management system to ensure compliance.
- For negative reviews, follow up in a discreet manner that does not violate HIPAA.
Create a Positive Office Experience to Trigger More Positive Reviews
While reviews should focus on your abilities as a chiropractor, your office staff also has a role to play. The entire office experience, from the greeting received when walking into the billing process, needs to be positive for you to get more positive reviews.
When someone mentions they feel better after an adjustment or comments on how friendly your office staff is, use that opportunity to request a review. Most people won’t think of it on their own, so you will want to trigger a thought to do it. If they’re happy with the care received, they’re likely to be happy to give a quick review.
Handle Negative Reviews Appropriately
You will have negative reviews on occasion. View these as an opportunity to rebuild relationships or show your professionalism to others, even if you can’t fix the negative reviewer’s opinion of you. Never ignore negative reviews, even if they’re from scammers, but respond to them in a way that shows warmth, empathy, and truth.
The key to dealing with negative reviews is knowing that they’re inevitable, so you shouldn’t fear them. Instead, confront them. Using good customer service to respond to a disgruntled patient will go far in solidifying your professionalism in the minds of the people reading the reviews because everyone knows there will be people who simply aren’t satisfied no matter what you do.
It can be tempting to flag negative reviews for removal but avoid this temptation. While negative reviews can feel like an affront when you work hard to treat patients well, people expect to see them. If you’re removing all negative reviews, then potential patients will grow skeptical. Instead, use them as a time to showcase your willingness to work with patients to achieve a satisfactory result. If the review is from someone who is not a patient, have a HIPAA-compliant response ready that indicates that fact.
Use Surefire Local to Get More 5-Star Reviews
Keeping up with your online reputation is challenging, especially when you’re focused on meeting the needs of your patients at the same time. The Surefire Local Marketing Platform offers an online reputation management platform for chiropractors that can help make the process easier while also generating more five-star reviews naturally. Here’s how it works.
Connect to Top Review Platforms for Real-Time Data
The Surefire Local Marketing Platform connects with the top review platforms, including Yelp, Facebook, and Google Business Profile pages. This allows you to see your reviews in one place. The timeline view makes it simple to track what people are saying about you.
Send Review Requests
When you have a happy patient, the Surefire Local Marketing Platform will connect with them to send a review request automatically. These requests are sent via email or text message so the patient can quickly and easily leave a review without much effort. The reminder makes it more likely that the patient will remember because all they have to do is click a link and mark their positive review. The simplicity of the process and the timeliness of the review request through the automated platform work together to increase the likelihood that the patient will leave that coveted positive review.
Stay Within the Platform for Posting Responses
The best way to utilize your reviews is to post responses to them, but remembering to log into all of your various review platforms to leave these responses is not always easy. Not only does it take time that you would rather spend working with your clients, but it also helps you see your responses at a glance. Through Surefire Local, you can post responses from one convenient platform.
Automate Reminders for Posting Reviews
Some patients will forget to post reviews. This is normal because people are busy. You can keep the task in their mind with our platform. It will send email or text reminders to patients who haven’t given a review yet, and this may prompt some to leave that review and boost your visibility online. Because the system’s automated, you don’t have to add another task in order to have these email and text reminders sent.
Save Time with a Single Platform
You won’t waste time jumping from platform to platform just to see if new reviews have been posted. You can see them all in one location and receive notifications about new reviews quickly. Since you can also respond to reviews through the Surefire Local Marketing Platform, you will cut the amount of time you spend on online marketing significantly, so you can focus on treating and interacting with your patients.
Measure Customer Sentiment
One of the unique features of the Surefire Local Marketing Platform is the word-cloud graph that measures brand sentiment. This graph shows the most frequently used words from patient reviews. This will give you an at-a-glance view of what people are saying about you. If a negative comment is consistently popping up, you can address it. If you have the same positive words showing up, you can commend your team for their excellent service to your patients.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo to Learn More
There are many tools to help you manage your reviews and your online reputation with ease. Surefire Local is one of the top options. It gives you one convenient platform to manage your practice’s online presence across various channels. As a comprehensive marketing system that consolidates not only reviews but also local SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, and paid advertisements, you can do it all on one platform and save significant amounts of time.
We work with thousands of small businesses, including many in the healthcare industry, each year. We’ve seen many practitioners double and even quadruple their income as a result of effective, streamlined marketing. Our goal is to help you improve transparency, increase your advertising ROI, and better manage your patients and your online content through one convenient platform.
Surefire Local specializes in online reputation management for chiropractic clinics and other healthcare practices. If you need a better, more positive online presence, it starts with the right platform. Attend a Surefire Local marketing platform demo to learn more about how our team and our platform can help you build a successful online presence.