What If My Imaging Center Gets a Bad Review Online?
It’s a healthcare practice’s nightmare; to learn that a disgruntled or disappointed patient has left a bad review online. As an imaging center, you attempt to provide top notch patient care to everyone that comes through your door, but no matter what, you might still meet a patient who is just hard to please.
Regardless of how well your staff treats your patients, they can develop a negative opinion of your imaging center. They can become disgruntled for a number of reasons that you can manage, but there are some ways patients can become frustrated that are out of your control.
Patient Experiences You Can Control
Feeling Welcomed – With a Smile
Clean, Comfortable Waiting Area
Easily Accessible Contact Information
Convenient Access to Patient Records
Patient Experiences You Can’t Control
Longer Wait Times – Due to External Delays
Frustration/Pain Based on Patient Ailment
Patients with Bad Attitudes
High Care/Procedure Costs
Read More: Why Your Healthcare Practice Needs Social Media
So, what do you do if a patient leaves a negative review of your imaging center on Facebook or Yelp? Or, what if a patient tweets something negative to you? How do you handle it?
How To Handle Bad Reviews on Social Media:
Step 1: Don’t delay. Be sure to respond quickly to reviews so you can take control of the situation before it has the chance to snowball into a bigger issue. Even if the bad review is in fact warranted, you can still salvage the situation with an appropriate response.
Step 2: Determine if the complaint is based on something you could control making it warranted, or if the complaint is something that doesn’t have to do with the quality of your service. Ex: “The front desk girl was very rude and was playing on her cell phone while I waited at the desk.” This is something you can fix as opposed to a review that reads, “I’ve been in pain for months so I tried to schedule an MRI at this imaging center but they wouldn’t give me an appointment unless I was referred by a doctor.” We know that in radiology, diagnostic testing requires a script, but some patients may not know that. So, while you can’t change this fact, you can do a better job of explaining this to patients and giving them advice on what to do next.
Step 3: Always be sympathetic, no matter what. An apology isn’t always warranted if the patient’s negative review is unwarranted. Sometimes people just complain to complain but even if they are wrong, you need to show empathy in your response.
Step 4: Offer some kind of solution or compromise. You can’t erase the past and you can’t refund patients for their care, but that doesn’t mean you can’t offer some kind of solution. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is provide the patient with the contact information of your marketing representative or office manager so they can speak directly with a person who might be able to help them. This is also an opportunity to do some further investigating to see if this can be a learning opportunity for your practice.
Some things to remember with regards to online patient reviews:
1. Just because you don’t think you have a Facebook page for your practice, doesn’t mean there isn’t a location listing on Facebook where patients can check in and write reviews. You must take ownership of your business’ page and merge the listing page to control it. You can’t control a Facebook listing but you can control a business page!
2. People are most likely to leave a review of their healthcare providers when they either have an extraordinarily positive or extraordinarily negative experience. You won’t often get people who say that their experience was just okay. Focus on branding your patient experience so it is something worth talking about in a positive light.
3. Sometimes a negative review with a strong, helpful response from the practice is more influential than a positive review. As a patient, seeing that someone from a practice would go out of their way to make amends for a negative experience shows that they are willing to go above and beyond for their patients.
Read More: Why You Need to Brand Your Practice’s Patient Experience
Need help managing bad reviews online for your practice? We can help, just fill out the form below!
Back to the Basics: Radiology Marketing
We’re always trying to think of innovative and creative ways to market our radiology practices to patients and the referring community, but sometimes it is best to take a step back. Go back to the basics. Marketing is about finding the things that make your practice memorable and showcasing those attributes.
Sometimes we get ourselves in marketing ruts though, by focusing on the wrong things about our practice. By thinking that the only benefits of our practices are related to accreditations or technology, we are forgetting about the components that truly make us unique.
Think about what it is like for a patient coming to your office. What are some of the things your staff does to make that patient feel comfortable and valued? How do you make sure that they have a positive experience? Starting today, think about some of the little things you can be doing to rebrand your patient experience.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
Opening Doors
Marigay McKee, President of Saks Fifth Avenue, with her doormen.
Saks Fifth Avenue is in the process of rebranding their Manhattan store by focusing on their shoppers’ experience. This started with the reintroduction of doormen, which brought the department store’s sense of luxury back. Now we don’t expect you to be hiring doormen for your imaging center, but if you can go a little out of your way to open the door for a patient you see coming in from the parking lot, do it.
Introductions
When a patient is called back from the waiting room, you’re meeting that patient for the first time. Introduce yourself to them. This is something you do when you meet people in scenarios outside of your imaging center, so why wouldn’t you do the same thing inside your imaging center?
Radiologist Availability
If your radiologists can be available by phone to consult with referring offices that can make all the difference in the world. This is one of the services that not all imaging centers can provide, but goes a long way.
Online Scheduling
Sometimes patients can’t get on the phone to schedule an appointment in the middle of the day, whether they are at work or just too busy during normal hours. If you can build in an online appointment request page to your website, that can be so useful to patients and referring physicians.
Clear Pricing
As a patient shopping for affordable radiology procedures, it can be very challenging to find what you are looking for because practices don’t want to disclose their costs. If no one else in your area is participating in price transparency, be the first one to join the party. Patients will appreciate your effort.
If your practice is already doing things like these, then don’t be afraid to let patients and referring offices know. If you aren’t focusing on the little things, then you have plenty of room to improve and let the community know that you’re changing your ways!
Why You Need to Brand Your Practice’s Patient Experience
Many practices can identify with the terrifying moment when you get an email from Yelp saying that your practice has received a new review. You’re sitting in your office chair, hanging in the balance of either honor or shame. Did a patient write complimentary comments about your service and how much they loved your practice or did they leave a scathing review saying how rude your office staff was to them? It’s challenging to manage negative reviews, especially in the instances where the patient was upset over something you could not control. People are exponentially more likely to provide feedback on something they either absolutely love or absolutely loathe, while the likelihood of comments coming from someone who had an “okay” experience is very low.
This means, you need to take every effort to provide each patient with a flawless experience to promote more positive reviews. The best way to do so is to brand your patient experience. Adding small touch-points to your patient process can make a huge difference in perception. Simple changes such as personally introducing a patient to each staff member they will meet with, can go a long way. Additionally, you could exchange paper robes for terry cloth ones or give patients slippers to protect their feet from chilly floors in the winter.
Things like that are what people remember when they leave your office. If they had to wait an extra 15 minutes because your schedule was running behind, then have coupons available as an apology. Whenever you travel Southwest Airlines for instance, if your flight gets delayed they offer complimentary adult beverages as collateral. (You’re not alone if you find yourself wishing for a flight delay every once in a while.)
To elicit positive responses, you can recruit the help of your staff. It likely happens everyday, that a patient says something positive in passing about their time at your practice. You can take those opportunities to remind patients that they can go online and review your practice.
You might think that websites like Yelp, Facebook and Google’s review pages don’t matter, but patients are becoming increasingly better consumers of their own care. They are turning to the Internet to find information on their physicians, treatments and procedures. In some statistics provided by Fluency Media, it was determined that 85% of Millennials and 78% of Baby Boomers are searching for health topics online. Take the appropriate steps to improve your patient experience while promoting positive reviews and you will be able to capture the attention of more patients and improve your reach!