Infographic – Online Patient Reviews Don’ts

Studying patients’ behavior is what Infinity Dental Web does frequently. We then apply our knowledge to ensure that our clients’ dental websites convert well. We recently surveyed a sampling of patients to learn how important online reviews really were to them when selecting a dentist. What we found is that 40 to 50% of the patients in our sampling read online reviews prior to choosing a dental office. Knowing this, we decided to take a closer look at how some of our clients’ online patient reviews are being managed by other companies. What we found is that the majority of the companies automate the review process, which actually does our clients a disservice.

Using an automated patient review process may hurt you more than help you.

Many patient communication companies offer automated patient appointment reminders as their primary service. Some also include patient appointment and bill payment portals. And, as an optional feature they include follow-up patient questionnaires where patients can comment about their dental visits. Once these comments have been submitted, they are then posted as reviews onto the communication company’s website. Automating these does in fact keep costs down, however; automating the patient survey process could hurt you more than help you. Here are some of the reasons why:

• Reviews are usually posted to the communication company’s proprietary website where they are not viewed by the public as much, instead of getting pushed out to websites like Google, Yelp, Bing, Kudzu, etc. Your patients are then unlikely to post another review on popular review sites that people tend to visit more.
• If you ever discontinue this company’s services, you may get possession of what your patients have written, but if you then post these on your website, they will lose their credibility as reviews.

Watch out for really bad advice.

One company that shall remain nameless offered one of our dental clients a very bad solution to reach more patients for reviews. The dentist was told to get an iPad for his patients to use to post reviews while in the waiting room. First off, this practice is a violation of Google’s guidelines, as they feel this compromises the integrity of the reviews process. They don’t want patients writing reviews from within your office. Having them use the dentist’s iPad is doubly problematic because Google tracks the iP address of the reviews. Secondly, the dentist was not logged out of his Google account when he offered his iPad to his patients. As a result, the really nice review that one of his patient’s posted appeared to be coming from the dentist himself. We immediately accessed his account and deleted the review before Google noticed it.

When it comes to patient reviews, there are many don’ts you should be made aware of. We also have some really great tips on getting quality patient reviews and how to get them posted where they’ll be visible. We even offer an IDW Reviews Management Tool to simplify the patient review process. Give us a call at 480-273-8888 for advice on how to get started right away.