How to Improve Patient Retention Through Feedback and Online Reviews

POSTED ON: Dec 12, 2020

How to Improve Patient Retention Through Feedback and Online Reviews Lauren Parr

How to Improve Patient Retention Through Feedback and Online Reviews

Your healthcare business relies on relationships with patients, so it's important to stay in touch with them to maintain their loyalty. One way to earn their trust besides quality performance is to ask for their feedback. Here are essential steps to using patient feedback to strengthen retention, reviews, and relationships.

Step 1: Provide Excellent Customer Service

One of the most crucial aspects of customer satisfaction is strong communication skills. Not only must you reach a common ground with each individual patient by talking on their level, you must use a compatible communication style. You need to learn which patients prefer more guidance and which ones have a more independent mindset. Another part of customer service in which you must pay close attention is spending enough time with each patient to let them know you care about their situation. Being a good listener is just as important as clearly articulating your thoughts. Improving online reviews, patient retention and building relationships usually take time, so it's important not to become frustrated or emotional about negative opinions.

Also Read: 10 Ways to Ask Your Happy Patients for Reviews (Without Sounding Impolite)

Step 2: Find a Standard Process to Take Follow-ups

In order to improve online reviews, patient retention, and your overall reputation, it's a wise strategy to make follow-up phone calls a standard practice. Since you can't always tell if a patient will return, it's helpful to find out after a visit what they thought about their experience. It gives you the chance to clear up any lingering questions or doubts they may have. Follow-ups allow you to clarify concerns, rebuild trust, and invite all patients to share their experience publicly. RepuGen is automated software that can help improve your online reputation in multiple ways, such as:

  • organizes customer reviews
  • makes it easy for all patients to leave honest reviews online
  • alerts you when customers give negative ratings
  • easy to use interface, saving you time to learn software
  • allows for comparing customer reviews over time and by locations
  • monitors customer feedback in real-time

The RepuGen software alerts you to dissatisfied feedback and allows you to follow up, while still ensuring the patient has access to review sites. Perhaps the complaint is a misunderstanding that you can clarify or they have a legitimate complaint that you can correct and improve upon.

Step 3: Set Up a Process to Solve Patient Concerns

Concern resolution is an important part of protecting your reputation. That's why you should develop a concern resolution process, which is a plan for handling patient complaints. It should involve documentation and dealing with the escalation in a professional manner. You should make sure that your entire staff is uniformly trained to support this process.

Step 4: Respond to Negative Reviews Honestly

One of the worst ways to escalate a conflict with a patient is to respond negatively to their negative review. While it's understandable that you want to defend your practice, you should first take into consideration what the patient is saying to see if they have valid points. Ultimately, you should respond in a matter that demonstrates your concern for the patient's well-being.

Step 5: Be HIPAA Compliant

The law requires all healthcare organizations to be HIPAA compliant or face heavy fines. You must also be HIPAA compliant when responding to online reviews. In other words, you are not allowed to cite confidential information in your rebuttals to patient complaints.

Conclusion

Today, online reviews help prospective patients make informed decisions. Your goal of improving online reviews, patient retention, and customer satisfaction can be achieved with RepuGen software and your determination to provide excellent service. Encouraging patients to leave honest, public feedback helps build a more trusted and transparent reputation.

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