Posts tagged “medical”

This happens…

…maybe not straight away, but over time.

Why?

It is simple really, and its all down to a combination of human motivation and how we interact with the web. People are just more motivated to write negative reviews, often in the heat of the moment, and often putting the blame on the wrong agency.

The two reactions to this behaviour…. 

1.  Logical: these are just 17 opinions out of many thousands, of course some people are going to be unhappy/disappointed but this should not colour a prospective – or existing  – patient’s view of the surgery (remember that most existing patients will see your reviews simply by the accident of them being in their eye-line when they look up your phone number/address/website).

2.  Emotional: “How can I possibly entrust my health and welfare to a surgery that scores so low (and/or has so many negative reviews)?”

The reality


Everyone reads reviews nowadays, and their reaction is likely to be a combination of both. 

No-one has to actively search for Google reviews, they are displayed in every search. In addition, many more reviews are being written – fourteen of the seventeen reviews of the surgery above have been written in the last twelve months. That pattern is not going to reverse itself any time soon.

The solution


Surgeries must engage – with Google. That does not mean abandoning any current patient feedback mechanisms, far from it, but it does mean incorporating modern professional review management into their interaction with patients.

Otherwise: dissatisfied patients will continue to post to Google, just in
increasing numbers (as more and more people find they are able to write a
Google review).


Preventing inaccurate or misleading reviews 

By sending an email or
text to the patient asking them for a review to be independently
verified and moderated by HelpHound potentially misleading or
inaccurate reviews will be sent to the surgery so they can engage with the patient
pre-publication, reviews will then be displayed on the surgery’s own website and the reviewer then
invited to copy their review to Google.

HelpHound


We are here to provide you with professional advice, and to design a review management strategy that dovetails with the way you operate your particular surgery, not shoehorn you into some ‘off the peg’ reviews solution.







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So much has happened in the world of reviews recently that we felt it only right not to wait until the end of the year before bringing you one of our regular reports.

Google, so dominant in search – 68% worldwide – is introducing changes at such a rate that the contrast between search on 1 January this year and now is as marked as any full year previously.

So – how does this affect our world, the world of professional review management?

The Big One…

Is the demise of review websites. They’re not quite dead yet, but they are dying. Don’t look at their metrics, look at their share prices: Yelp down from $85 to $25, TripAdvisor down from $95 to $70, Angie’s List down from $9 to $5. And the only reason TripAdvisor and Angie’s List have not quite taken the hit that Yelp has is their fractionally smaller reliance on Google (for now).


Why?

This is so simple: because Google has ramped up its own review offering. Search for any kind of business and who do you see? Trustpilot reviews? No – Google reviews. Yelp reviews? No – Google reviews.


You own a business and you’d like your Yelp reviews to show in your Google ads? They did last year (with a nice star rating). This year? Google reviews.

Reviews may be small beer for Google, but with the number of Google users and their positioning in search it will be Googlers, not Yelpers, who dictate inward business flows for you from now on. 

The impact for your business

If you have committed resources (effort and/or funds) to getting reviews to any specialist review site you should be examining strategies for redirecting that energy. For the forseeable future the there are only two places you are going to need reviews:

• On your own website
• On Google

Just imagine that you accumulate a hundred great reviews on Google and your competitor has only five, ten or fifteen, how great will you feel? And what if that position were reversed?

While we’re on that topic (reviews on your own website)…

Retailers were quick to recognise the value of reviews on their own sites; they understood, early on, that consumers would buy with more confidence if they were given credible (independently verified) reviews.

 
But service providers and the professions have been much slower to climb aboard: the old fashioned ‘testimonial’ still pervades. It is important for businesses to understand that independently verified reviews, hosted on the business’s own website, are just as important in driving new business for estate agents, solicitors and financial advisers as they are for electricals and white goods retailers.

With the current dearth of businesses like these hosting independently verified reviews, the opportunity for those in these sectors to steal a march on their competitors is still massive.

Action needed

Lose the fear: and stop treating reviews as an add-on and integrate them into your core marketing plan. Get a professional review manager like HelpHound to work alongside you (you will need them for the crucial independence, if for nothing else).


Make sure that they can cover both bases for you: reviews on your own website and reviews to Google.


Then sit back and watch the results roll in – guaranteed!

In your first weeks of operating Dialogue your business has gone from no reviews on its own website and no (or very few) reviews on Google to ‘lots’ on your own site and ‘some’ on Google. What happens now?


To get the right answer to that question it is important to understand how consumers use reviews. There has now been plenty of academic research in that field and all of it points to the following:

1. The pure number of reviews can either boost or dilute the impression you create online. Put simply: a business with 100 great reviews looks bigger and more successful than a business with 50 (and much more so than one with none). The message here is loud and clear: never take your foot off the throttle.
2. Recent reviews matter: If consumers see that the last review was written months ago that runs the risk pf creating the impression that it was written by the business’s most recent customer. Then some will draw the conclusion that you are not a great force in your marketplace.
3. The content of reviews is important: it is used by Google to create the three ‘rich snippets’ shown in the Knowledge Panel (the box that pops up to the right in search containing all your business details – see illustrations below), so encouraging customers to make content detailed and relevant is a good idea. Simply explain how important this is to your business and your customers will respond with great content.

More detail:


Pure numbers

Remember that four reviews a month will add up to fifty by this time next year (and how many of your competitors have anything like that number)? Perseverance is the key here.

Recent reviews

If you build the fact that you will be inviting reviews into all your dealings with your customers they will be upset if you don’t invite them, rather than the other way around! That’s the way to keep your reviews fresh, as well as the numbers steadily growing.


Rich snippets*

Rich snippets are one of the most important aspects of the Google Knowledge Panel – there for all to see, every time you feature in search results. Negative rich snippets can do untold harm. Here’s what one client’s looked like when they joined at the end of last year:

And here’s what they look like now (less than three months later):

And for anyone wondering about this business: they are a large well-established lettings agency with a very positive and proactive attitude to tenant relations. But with thousands of tenants it was all too easy for the disgruntled minority to dominate what was being said online, so the impression being given was heavily skewed towards that tiny (but vocal) minority’s opinions. Dialogue has redressed the balance for them (and will continue to do so).


And one last thing…


There’s much more to our role, but clients refer time-and-again to the ‘discipline’ element, by which they mean that Dialogue ensures that they are always up-to-date as far as reviews are concerned; that they are consistent in requesting (and therefore getting) great reviews, month in, month out.


*Rich snippets: Google software analyses the content of all your reviews, looking for the three predominating themes, it then chooses a phrase from a review that relates to those themes and displays all three as illustrated above.

The professions (in this context: medicine, the law, financial management, estate agency and the like) come to Dialogue with one (small and eminently surmountable) disadvantage and one massive advantage, compared with, say, those in hospitality.


Whereas hotels and restaurants have numbers in their favour when looking for customers to write reviews (a hundred bed hotel is likely to host upwards of 15,000 guests a year) the professions have an asset that more than makes up for their lack: the customer (client) bond is profoundly greater, and this can be employed to great effect.


Your objective


Your aim will be to get as many great reviews to your website as you can, and get as many of those posted on to whichever external website matters the most (for the purposes of this article let’s call that Google). 


To do this effectively you must make the most of this bond. You must optimise the ratio of clients who respond to your invitation to a) write their review to your website and b) go on to copy that review to Google.


Optimising response

In an ideal world every client would respond (to both the invitation to your site and to Google). But we all operate in the real business world, where time is at a premium and emails, despite best intentions, go unanswered.


So our advice to our new clients (born of over eight years’ experience) is as follows:

1. Build the fact that you will be asking every client to write a review into every aspect of client contact. Mention it when you first meet (‘We invite all our clients to write a review…’) and clients will be actively expecting your email when the transaction is completed.
2. Make sure all client-facing staff reinforce the message. For instance, clients will often thank staff over the phone or by email, if staff are trained to say ‘Oh, please do remember that when you are asked to write your review’ the message hits home.
3. Don’t just email (the invitation to write the review) and hope. Most important of all, follow up with a brief phone call.

The crucial phone call 

It takes less than a minute, and it should go something like this…

“Just calling to say that the review you’ve been asked to write is really important to us. Once you have posted your review you will be asked to copy it to Google, this helps us create local awareness, so I’d be really grateful.”  


Everyone has their own words to communicate the same message: ‘please don’t ignore the emails’.


What we do know…


Is that if you do this, you will get reviews, great reviews to your website and great reviews to Google. 

And before you know it, the phone call will become second nature, part and parcel of your customer service regime. 

Two medical related reasons for Yelp to be in the news today. First: they are now sharing the lead in online reviews of the medical profession with a specialist site (Healthgrades):

Read full article here

Second: A Kansas City orthodontist has again raised the question of a patient’s right to free speech online: by threatening to sue the poster of a three star review on Yelp. 

See the full story here

This case also brings into question (again!) the Yelp ‘review filter’ – there have been 95 reviews of this orthodontics practice and 90 – yes, ninety – have been filtered. We had a long hard look at both filtered and unfiltered reviews to see if we could divine any logic. Let’s have a look…


First the five unfiltered reviews:

1. Five star – the reviewer has written 19 more reviews and has 13 Yelp ‘friends’
2. Three star – the contentious review. The reviewer has written 70 more reviews and has 27 ‘friends’
3. One star – a troll who has written no more reviews and has no ‘friends’
4. One star – another trolling review. Has written fourteen more reviews and has three ‘friends’
5. Five star – 73 more reviews and 43 ‘friends’

Now the filtered ones:

Most, both positive and negative, are singletons (that is: they are the only review posted by that reviewer).

Now, we would understand the logic behind Yelp’s filter if the two blindingly obvious trolling reviews had been filtered. But they have not. Here they are so you can judge the value they give to the Yelp community (and anyone searching for an orthodontist):

We fail to see why anyone would vote either of these ‘Useful’ but 13 Yelpers have to date

The message for UK medical professionals


All of this kind of comment is unhelpful to medical professionals. Sites like Yelp ought to do more to ensure the reviews they publish are written by people with first hand experience of the business being reviewed. But they are seemingly reluctant to push too far down this road for purely financial reasons. Instead they appear to be focusing on lobbying state legislatures to toughen up freedom of speech legislation to allow any ‘genuinely held opinions’ to be submitted and published. They seem to be blissfully unaware that the same people who write their reviews are the kind of people – the ‘Stepford Wives’ of Shellie W’s review – who will lose their jobs when, in turn, their own employers fall victim to unfairly damaging reviews.


In the meantime businesses (and medical professionals should see themselves under this heading for the purpose of reviews – they are treated no differently) owe it to themselves and their patients to find a better way of engaging with reviews.

More than ever before the medical and caring professions have to address the concept of reviews

First let’s examine the current state of the reviews and the medical profession…


Specialist sites


If a business or service exists you can be sure that there will be review sites specifically targeting it, it’s the nature of the web. Here are some examples:

From NHS Choices

From IWantGreatCare

General sites


A ‘general’ review site is one where anyone can comment on any type of business or service, from accountants to zoos. here’s an example of a review on Yelp, the big daddy of them all…

Yelpers don’t pull their punches!

Benefits


Everyone wants reviews: patients commonly search the web for them; they want to know what the existing patients of a given practice or practitioner think. In today’s competitive environment practitioners welcome honest feedback as a way of attracting new patients, and, just as importantly, a way of gaining valuable insight.


Drawbacks

Not all reviews are written with the best of intentions: some are written maliciously (some have even been known to be posted by competitors)! Much more commonly, misguided (and potentially damaging) opinions are posted about complex medical issues without the practitioner being able to engage with the patient beforehand.

Is this really representative of the practice?

Right-of-reply


With reviews of hotels or restaurants the simple ‘right-of-reply’ which is incorporated into most review sites may be all that is needed to correct misconceptions. This is not enough for medical issues: they are far too important, for the patient in question and for the potential patient reading the review. There has to be a better way…


There is. All reviews at HelpHound are moderated (read by trained professional moderators) in a process we call Resolution ™, and any reviews that contain issues which should be addressed by the practitioner are first forwarded to that practitioner for response. 

People actively engage with this process and both parties find it rewarding, to the extent that over 99% of reviews that are written and subject to Resolution result in no final review being published. 


Administration


It’s every medical practitioner’s nightmare – more paperwork, more complex technology. How to keep track of the 47 sites where a patient might comment? The answer is simple: you don’t have to. 

Invite all your patients to write a simple review, direct to your practice, once a year and/or whenever they feel the need…

What your patients’ reviews will look like on your website – a mock-up with thanks to Abingdon Medical Practice

HelpHound will moderate them and we will publish them on your own website; we will also invite your patients to post their reviews to Google so you don’t look like these GPs when future patients search:

Your prospective patients are looking for reviews – here (on Google) and on your own website, but only one patient has posted one review on one of these practices. What a lost opportunity to benefit for everyone concerned, practice and patients alike

To summarise


Dialogue brings you and your patients all the benefits of reviews and none of the drawbacks: it can only be good for you both.

• Great feedback, easily analysed 
• Positive comments to show to prospective patients
• Negative issues managed in private, benefiting both parties equally

 

Please contact Karen Hutchings (karen.hutchings@helphound) for more details.