As a dentist, an effective way that you can manage your reputation is to timely address negative reviews on your review pages. Some of your patients will leave reviews on your review pages.
While most of the reviews may be positive reviews, some of the reviews may be negative reviews. Leaving negative reviews to remain on your review pages without addressing them adequately can harm the reputation of your dental practice.
You need to quickly address negative reviews before they can cause harm to your practice. You don’t want potential patients to read reviews that can discourage them from seeking your services.
People seeking the services of a dentist will likely go through your review pages to see what others are saying about your dental practice before deciding if to contact you.
They would like to know how you relate with your existing patients and handle negative reviews.
Handle Negative Reviews
You must timely attend to negative reviews before they get to the full glare of potential patients. Below are the different ways that you can handle negative reviews from your patients:
Respond Quickly With A Personalized Response
As a dentist, when you see a negative review, it is crucial that you respond quickly with a personalized response.
The patient who wrote the negative review on your review page is probably not satisfied for one reason or another, so you would want to address the patient’s concern as soon as possible.
When responding to a patient’s negative feedback, you need to be professional and ensure that you’re proffering a solution to the specific issue raised by the patient. Do not ignore negative reviews as they can greatly harm your reputation.
Ignoring patients’ negative reviews can push potential patients away from your practice and reduce patient retention rates.
Patients expect prompt response from you when they give feedback, particularly when they’re not satisfied with a particular service or treatment. You should be careful when responding to negative reviews.
When responding to a negative review, acknowledge the patient’s feedback and apologize for whatever issue or dissatisfaction the patient is discussing. Then, offer a possible solution or ways that the issue can be addressed.
Let your patients know that you appreciate them for seeking your services and that you will continue improving your service delivery to ensure they’re satisfied.
Ask For a Second Chance
After adequately responding to the negative feedback, you must take active steps to improve patient’s experience with your practice.
Ask your patients how you can improve their experience with your practice in the future. This can help improve your patients’ retention rate.
Negative reviews from your patients may contain valuable information that can help improve your overall service delivery. When patients give feedback on areas that need improvements, incorporate the feedback into your service delivery to improve your service delivery.
Don’t forget to encourage your patients to continue patronizing your practice while promising them improved service delivery.
Remove Negative Reviews From Your Review Pages
While all businesses crave positive reviews, you should also understand that negative reviews can also help improve your service delivery. However, if you feel you’ve some undeserved negative reviews, fake, or misleading reviews, you can take active steps to remove them from your review page.
Below are steps that you can take to remove negative reviews from your review page:
Sign in to your Google Business Manager
Find the negative review on the Google Review Page
Flag the review as inappropriate
Choose an option for the question, “What’s wrong with this review?”
Report the review to Google.
A faster way to remove a negative review from your review page is to ask the person who wrote it to delete it. You should only ask a patient to delete a negative review after adequately addressing the review.
You can contact the person who wrote the review privately and politely ask to have the review removed. First, appreciate the person for their feedback and request if he or she will consider removing the review.
Avoid making any demands and be patient with such people. However, the best way to effectively delete a bad review is to drown it out in a sea of good reviews.
Top 5 Review Platforms for Dentists
Google My Business Review Manager
This is one of the best and most reputable review platforms for dentists. It is designed for professionals, agencies and businesses to help with streamlining review management.
Google My Business Review Manager is a great platform for increasing your dental practice awareness online. It displays your practice business page on Google Maps, which increases your digital presence and allows you to reach a wider audience.
Additionally, it gives a direct contact feature which connects you to patients who need your dental service. It also has a review segment where patients can write and leave reviews after their experiences with your dental practice.
Yelp
This is a crowd-sourced local business review and social networking site. It is one of the most popular and powerful online ratings sites.
Yelp focuses on long-form reviews rather than short one-liners, providing the kind of in-depth, thorough reviews that potential patients want to read so that they can have in-depth understanding of your dental practice.
Healthgrades
This is also a review platform a dentist can use to receive patients’ reviews. The platform allows patients to leave reviews of their doctors and healthcare providers, including dentists.
It offers solid information for patients to assess the practice they want to visit and lets dentists know what their patients think about their practice.
Yahoo Local
Once you claim your Yahoo local listing, you can boost your dental practice’s digital presence. This platform not only gives you an avenue to receive feedback from your dental patients but also provides potential patients with up-to-date and accurate information about your services.
Yahoo may no longer be the most popular search engine, but Yahoo Local is still one of the best platforms you can use as a dentist as it helps increase local SEO.
Facebook Ratings
Facebook is another powerful review platform that a dentist can use. Facebook holds about 19% of all customer reviews. The social media platform also ranks in the top five list of review sites people check before visiting a business, including a clinic.
Unlike most platforms that use traditional online reviews and ratings, Facebook uses recommendations and reviews to rate a brand.
Reputation Management Software
Google Alerts
The internet is ever-evolving, and platforms like Google Alerts allow you to stay up to date with managing your reputation online. Somebody might post something that references you as a dentist on the internet.
You can set up a Google Alert for your dental practice. Google will alert you with an email when it picks up a new mention of your name or practice. This will make it easier for you to take action, whether complimentary or not.
BuzzSumo
This content marketing tool has a great reputation management feature. It allows you to comb the web for any content that includes your search term. Its key distinctive feature is including the amount of engagement associated with each search result.
Using search filters like date, country, content type and all, you can know everything that patients are writing about your practice online.
BuzzSumo provides engagement figures for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. It provides the total number of links each search result has received. You can create alerts in BuzzSumo to track brand mentions, competitor mentions, keyword mentions, and backlinks.
Reputology
As the name suggests, Reputology helps brands protect their reputation. This tool specializes in review tracking to easily find and monitor brand reviews online. If Yelp, Facebook reviews and similar review sites have a major impact on your business, this is the tool for you.
It streamlines your reputation management process by delivering all your reviews in one place and even lets you respond to them from within the platform.
Dentist Reputation Management Strategies
Below are effective dentist reputation management strategies that you can use to manage your practice reputation.
Track your current brand reputation.
An essential reputation management strategy is to track your brand’s current situation regarding its reputation. It would help to analyze your current standing to determine the future of your practice.
Start by monitoring your online reputation on social media and review sites. Also, monitor forums, blogs, and news websites where people express their views about brands.
Know what people are saying about your practice so that you will know the areas to improve on.
Create an actionable plan
The next strategy is to create an actionable plan to enhance your reputation. The responsibilities of every person involved in the reputation management process should be distributed in your action plan.
Your action plan can include the person who will be in charge of tracking the feedback and reviews, the person who will be in charge of responding to new reviews, and so on.
Assign specific tasks to each team member so everything is organized and everyone knows their role in managing your practice’s reputation.
Monitor and control reviews
You need a system to track and manage your reviews as you can’t always be available to manage all your reviews. You can use review websites like Google My Business and Yelp to control your reviews.
You can also use reputation management software like Reputology and Google Alerts to keep track of all your reviews and practice mentions online.
Monitoring and controlling your reviews is crucial as it helps to address your patients' concerns before any harm is done to your practice’s reputation.
Conclusion
The internet is very large and anyone can say anything online. Many people go through reviews before deciding whether to patronize a service.
This is why reputation management is very important for any business or dentist. As a dentist, you must actively seek effective strategies to manage your practice’s reputation to attract new patients to your dental practice and retain existing patients.
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