By Podium

As much as it probably pains you to admit, not all the patients you see are going to leave your practice happy, despite everyone's best effort. It's inevitable, even though no one likes to get negative reviews. In fact, it's hard not to take them personally. Having a strategy in place for how to respond to them, however, is essential.

If you don't have a plan in place, things could go horribly wrong and possibly do irreparable damage to your business, especially if you respond to negative reviews without any sort of strategy. There was a famous case a couple years back where a business owner did just that. Faced with a number of negative reviews on its Facebook page, the owner of a restaurant in Arizona went ballistic. In the moment, this probably felt good, but the long-term impact it had on their business probably wasn't worth that brief moment of euphoria.

It is imperative to learn from others' mistakes and take advantage of the resources that are at your disposal. In the free ebook Turning a Negative into a Positive, we outline a proven process to respond to negative reviews, discuss ways that negative reviews can help improve your business operations, and review the benefits of having an online review management platform.

Putting yourself in your patients' shoes is a key to success. Understand the intent of why they are taking the time to write a negative review. Does the patient's comment sound as though it is designed to cause tension with over-exaggeration, or does it seem like a valid concern that a patient of yours would really like to be resolved?

Understanding the patient rather than acting in the heat of the moment can help turn a negative comment into a positive, regardless of the issue. You simply need to hit the right pain points. Training yourself to think as your patient would and respond in a positive way is vital. You may be on social media responding to a review, but you are representing the business. Never forget to be professional and represent the business with respect and class.

Just as your patient would want complete transparency, it's not just what you say, but when and how you say it. The patient feedback loop is crucial to pleasing your patients. Every patient is different, and you need to create a review answering system that can adjust the functionality for all your current patients and potential new patients.

Something as simple as review management can help your practice succeed or run it into the ground. What will the fate of your practice be? This ebook can help you create an ideology that works best for your practice.

Podium is an interaction management platform that enables companies with a local presence to conveniently connect with their customers at critical touchpoints to help them strengthen their business. By conveniently facilitating millions of customer interactions, such as driving customer-generated online reviews and providing improved customer messaging tools, Podium serves more than 35,000 local businesses to create more than 10 million interactions with its customers every month.

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