How to Increase Patient Retention By Improving 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 improving online reviews, patient retention, and building 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: 12 Simple Ways to Encourage Patients to Leave Great Reviews For Your Practice
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 can be effective ways to persuade negative patients to change their attitudes and even reviews about your service. RepuGen is automated software that can help improve your online reputation in multiple ways, such as:
- organizes customer reviews
- allows customers to easily post positive 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 allows you to intercept negative reviews and gives you a chance to contact the patient before posting. 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 HIPPA Compliant
The law requires all healthcare organizations to be HIPPA compliant or face heavy fines. You must also be HIPPA compliant when responding to online reviews. In other words, you are not allowed to cite confidential information in your rebuttals to patient complaints.
Conclusion
These days online reviews are very important to influencing others to consider a business. 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 with incentives to post positive reviews adds to this winning strategy. Related Posts:
Healthcare Reputation Management
