While you are sharing your digital marketing activities on different social media platforms or your own website, you are subjected to positive feedback and negative feedback too! You may receive all kinds of feedback despite of having real online presence as patients may review your services on different forums and Facebook groups.
Sample of a patient’s negative feedback
Read also: How digital marketing attracts patients to your clinic?
So you can have negative reviews and comments whether you have online digital activity or not. How can we deal with this issue?
First: Establish your online digital presence
If you have decided not to establish your online digital channels, you will be surprised with the number of negative reviews from patients whom have not really enjoyed their experience, the first step to overcome and control any negative feedback or comments is to establish your online channels and to assign this job to someone who would continuously take care of these negative comments wherever they are found.
Reputation Management
Your work and experience would be published online through different posts, tweets and blog posts. We are watching, responding and reporting using the best tools to protect your reputation.
Second: Respond Quickly
You can never prevent patients from negatively reviewing your services, but quick response and detailed replying to these reviews would prevent the negative effect on your potential patients. Generally detailed, confident quick response would convert a negative review into an opportunity through placing persuasive responses to patients complains without mentioning any medically relevant secrets or breaking through patients’ privacy. This would lead to positive effects on your potential patients.
Third: Do not ever forget that they are not physicians
Patients’ negative feedback is generally not accurate from the medical point of view as patients express their own opinions in a medically irrelevant way! So it is important to simplify medically related information at your clinic and online too. You have to respond to negative comments in a simple way and always remember that your goal is not to impact the angry patient but to present positive attitude to all of the followers and visitors that may be thousands of people.
Fourth: You are not always right
It is easy to manage an angry patient’s comment when he/she is not right, but you are not always right too! When your patient is right, you have to apologize. If the patient is complaining about long time of waiting at your clinic, lack of good services within the clinic or about any other administrative issues, you would better consider this complaint as a gift that can help you fixing all of your faults! So do not always try to apologize quickly as you may not be wrong, but if your fault is confirmed, it would be better to apologize.
Fifth: Ask the complainant to contact you in person
It is better to ask the complainant to contact you or your clinic staff directly instead of revealing the details of the complaint to online audience; direct contact can easily handle any misunderstanding. If the patient’s issue is resolved, ask him/her to update his/her review so that all of your potential patients would realize that they will be cared of upon visiting you.
Read also: How to prevent negative feedback from destroying your clinic’s reputation?
