Here’s How to Cultivate Patient Feedback — and Why It Matters
Online reviews have been around a while now, but are hearing care and ENT businesses giving them the attention they deserve? Many aren’t necessarily devoting resources to building their reviews, managing consumer feedback, or addressing negative reviews.
Having a strategy not only to build your online reviews but also to manage your online reputation is no longer simply an option for a local business — it’s a necessity. Reviews often help consumers decide whether they want to do business with you. Here’s a closer look at the importance of consumer reviews and ways to leverage them for your practice.
A Few Stats Illustrating the Importance of Online Reviews
Did you know? According to some important estimates:
- 85% of consumers trust online reviews just like personal recommendations
- 68% of customers shape their thoughts on a business after considering 1 to 6 reviews
- 56% of consumers say “yes” to companies that reply to reviews
- 81% of consumers look up reviews on Google before checking out a business
Beyond consumers valuing and trusting reviews, Google and other search engines are paying attention to them as well. Online reviews can help boost your perceived trustworthiness, bring more relevant keywords to your site, and increase web traffic.
Where to Focus on Getting Online Reviews
Many sites offer places for consumers to post reviews of your business. Three of them, however, can have the most impact for your practice: Google, Yelp, and Facebook. If your business is going to focus on building and managing online reviews, we recommend having a solid presence among those core platforms.
Not only are they the most relevant review sites for your practice, but other sites like Bing will pull reviews directly from your Yelp and Facebook pages, making them even more powerful. Google reportedly has nearly 82% of search engine market share. Bing has an estimated 10.51% share.
Want to Respond to Reviews? It’s Important to Claim Your Business
To manage and respond to reviews on these sites, you need to have claimed or created a business page. Populating your profile includes making sure it has the right information about your company.
If you haven’t claimed your business profile on Google or Yelp, it may still be listed on one of these sites where people are posting reviews. With the page unclaimed, however, you can’t respond to positive or negative feedback, missing opportunities to engage consumers and reinforce your brand.
It may seem obvious that a business should respond to a negative online review, but consumer feedback often goes unaddressed. This can affect the decision-making of prospects who are seeking the services and products the business offers. They care about how businesses handle dissatisfied customers.
Per some key stats:
- 96% of consumers seek out negative online reviews to see how the company handles them
- 53% of consumers expect a company to respond within a week to negative reviews
- 87% of companies don’t respond to negative reviews — a lost opportunity
Claiming your online business listing helps ensure you’re able to respond to reviews and coordinate a quality online-review strategy. Solidifying your profile is easier than you may think:
- For Google, you can visit the Google Business Profile page to check if your listing has already been created and claimed or if you still need to set one up.
- For Yelp, you can visit the Yelp for Business page to check whether your listing has been created and claimed.
- Most companies already have a Facebook business page, but if you don’t, you can follow Meta’s quick-start guide to set up your practice’s public online profile. Keep in mind that you need a personal Facebook account to set up your business page.
Start Building Out Your Reviews
With your business listings claimed and up to date, you can begin increasing your reviews. Start by asking for reviews. Some patients will post a review without being prompted. For a significant increase in online reviews across various sites, however, you need to ask patients to post their feedback.
About 80% of reviews posted online were prompted by follow-up emails, according to researchers, and another survey found that 12% of customers will always post an online review when asked. It pays to ask for what you want.
Here are some ways to ask for online reviews from your patients. The key is to be diverse in the way you ask and to give the patient several options for where they can post the review. That’s why it’s critical to have your listings claimed and optimized:
- Create a page on your website with links to each review site. Again, give the patient the option of which site they want to leave a review on. This also helps create diversity in where your reviews go. It adds more credibility to your practice.
- Send an email to your patients asking for an online review after they’ve enjoyed a positive experience at your business. If you don’t have an automated system like Audigy’s Online Review Program — specifically vetted and designed for hearing care practices — it’s critical to be 100% positive you send these types of emails only to your happiest patients.
- Create marketing materials such as posters, postcards, and tabletop cards that you can leave in your office and share with your patients, reminding them to leave reviews. Tools available through the business profiles you set up with platforms such as Google may also include posters or other collateral for requesting reviews on that platform.
Don’t be shy about sharing great patient reviews. Here’s an Audigy-produced video from which you might draw some ideas. This clip showcases various reviews of our company. It also thanks those who took time to post reviews and encourages folks to check us out.
It can take time to create all the marketing materials needed to build out a quality review program. Online-review programs, however, can offer services that automate steps such as sending one-off emails to patients. With some research, you can identify the program that’s aligned with your specific needs. Make sure it’s HIPAA-compliant!
At Audigy, we make it easy for practices to create consistently exceptional patient experiences, grow their online-review count, and stand out in their markets. To learn more about our marketing expertise and how we can help you, don’t wait. Discover our data-driven marketing services today.