Imagine, just for a minute, that every satisfied patient who you helped sent you a new patient. What would that mean for your practice? How many more new patients would be calling your practice each week? 10, 20, 30 patients?
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But, and this is a big one, most practices’ patients don’t do that. They don’t tell all their friends and make it easy for others to hear how great your practice truly is. And it’s not because they aren’t delighted with your services either.
The problem is most practices don’t have a simple system for generating patient reviews. That’s it. With a system, they could easily be attracting 5 or more new patients a month if they had a flood of positive patient reviews.
How important are reviews to growing your practice?
88% of your patients’ buying decisions are influenced by reviews, which should be enough to make you sit up and take notice. Even the search engine giant Google is paying attention to how many reviews a website has – making reviews one of the top 5 factors in local search engine optimization.
One practice owner recently told us flat out that our review building system was the single best marketing idea of the last 12 months and was responsible for the jump in new patient visits to her practice.
What’s the catch?
We won’t beat around the bush. Getting patient reviews can be tough. In the past, practices have struggled to get reviews. Most staff just aren’t comfortable asking for patient reviews, much less haven’t had a simple system for patients to submit them.
Here are 7 easy steps to getting 5 star reviews:
- Get listed on review sites – Make sure your practice is listed on the most visited review sites, so patients can find you and leave their glowing comments.
- Provide review links – On your reviews page on your website, include links to the social media review sites.
- Prepare a handout – Give patients a business card when they leave, linking them to the page on your site explaining how and where to leave reviews online.
- Show your appreciation – Send a personal email and handwritten note to patients the same day they visited your office–not a canned one, but include something specific about them, and thank them for their trust. Use the P.S. to send them to your website and instructions on how to submit a review.
- Demonstrate an interest in them – Have someone on the staff call them within 72 hours to see if everything is going well with their new hearing aids. Get them to provide at least one positive comment and then walk them through how to provide an online review.
- Ask – Too often, getting more patient reviews is as simple as asking. Of course, the key is making the “ask” an integral part of your system of patient care.
- Automate review collection – Truth is, most of us can’t remember what we ate for dinner 4 nights ago, much less to ask for patient reviews, which is why automating the whole process works so much better. More about this below.
Simple as these 7 steps are, we’ve found a lot of practices want an even easier way to collect patient reviews. Not that we blame them, given how busy they are helping patients. Which is why this month, we’ll be detailing a way to automate the whole patient review collection process. That way, with an automated review system, you don’t need to manage or worry about it and you can still benefit from many more 5 star patient reviews.
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