The value of Demandforce reviews
Date: July 3, 2014Category: Author: David Hall
We have a number of clients who use Demandforce services, and I believe those services are valuable. Automated appointment management and patient contact services free up the time of office staff and promote patient loyalty. My own dentist uses Demandforce services, and my experience with those services is highly positive. But if you are using Demandforce, I would recommend disabling the reviews solicitation feature, and I’ll explain why, using a case study. And I want to analyze them in light of two issues: Reviews credibility, and reviews visibility.
A Reviews Case Study
Client A has a thriving practice with two offices in a metropolitan area of around a million people. They have been using Demandforce for at least a couple of years, and have a number of reviews, all positive. Demandforce reports that 100% of their patients writing reviews would refer friends and family to their practice. However, this practice has recently decided to drop Demandforce and go with RevenueWell, which is designed specifically to integrate with their particular office management software. As a result, Demandforce will take down the reviews page for this practice. They say they will send the practice a copy of the reviews. But how valuable will that be? The answer to that question requires an understanding of reviews credibility.
Online reviews are becoming, more and more, a key part of online marketing. Their impact is highlighted by the number of lawsuits over those reviews. I saw an ad recently from a law firm that specializes in lawsuits over online reviews. The reason is that reviews are beginning to have a powerful impact on the companies being reviewed. But their impact depends on the credibility of the review.
Google has been addressing the credibility of its reviews for a couple of years now. Look up any business and find its Google business listing. Then look at its reviews. Notice that the Google reviews from a couple of years ago are identified as coming from anonymous Google users. But all the recent ones are identified by name. Why is that? Because Google understands this issue of reviews credibility. They decided, a couple of years ago, to force people to use their real names when writing reviews to give those reviews credibility.
Now look at this graph of the increasing trust people are giving reviews.
Notice the item I have circled. There are a growing number of people who understand that some reviews are not authentic.
Let’s apply this concept of reviews credibility to these Demandforce reviews.
It’s pretty easy to see that if Demandforce gives you the text of the reviews they have collected and then you publish them on your website, that they lose their credibility and they can no longer be called reviews – they are testimonials. A testimonial is a statement you have collected from your patient that you post, and you have editorial control over it. A review, on the other hand, is gathered in such a way that you have no editorial control.
But consider the reviews that Demandforce posted for this dental practice while they were still posted on the Demandforce website. Yes, they were gathered independently. Or were they? All of them were positive, offering glowing praise of the practice. Is that reality? Should you be suspicious of those reviews? Did the fact that they were gathered by a company that was hired by the dental practice taint the reviews process at all? I suspect that it could have.
But there is an additional problem with these reviews, and that is visibility. A couple of months ago, we conducted a focus group in which we monitored how people looked up reviews of dentists. They would find the Google business page for the practice and would notice the Google reviews, but they rarely noticed the posted link to other reviews. And even when they did, they dismissed the link to the Demandforce reviews because they didn’t recognize the name.
Finally, there is a third problem with these reviews, which we turned up when we tried to search for other reviews for this thriving dental practice with two offices in this metropolitan area of about a million people. This practice had NO Google reviews, NO Yelp reviews, NO Yahoo reviews, NO Healthgrades reviews. It appears that their solicitation of Demandforce reviews has cannibalized their other reviews. I’m guessing that patients who might have felt inclined to write a Google or a Yelp review have thought that since they wrote a Demandforce review, they don’t need to write another. This is not the only practice where we have seen this happen: a lot of Demandforce reviews and zero other reviews.
The bottom line? After a couple of years invested in gathering reviews of questionable value at the expense of reviews that might have been more visible, this practice will be left with no online reviews at all. Those reviews, which were never terribly valuable in the first place, will now be converted to testimonials which will be even less valuable. And that is why, if I were practicing today, knowing what I know, yes, I would probably hire Demandforce for its appointment reminders and other patient communications tools, but I would disable the reviews feature.
In 2014, online reviews need to be a key part of your marketing strategy. But those reviews need to have credibility, and to have credibility, they need to be gathered by a trustworthy independent entity that is not beholding to your practice: Google, Yelp, Healthgrades, or similar reviews outlets.