Earlier, I talked about how you can be alerted when somebody leaves a negative review against you or your company. After all, you need to first know about the negative reviews before you can do anything about it.
The sad thing is, most doctors and healthcare professionals are so involved with the day to day operations of their practice, that they haven’t either taken the time to learn how to address the bad reviews, or they are completely unaware that it even happens.
Just as positive reviews can build your business and take it to the next level, negative reviews in a worst case situation can ruin your business. It is estimated that they a negative review cost a Virginia contractor $300k in revenues.
Exactly How to Address Negative Reviews
First, determine if the review is legitimate. If it is not real, you could ‘flag’ it. This isn’t something I recommend unless you are 100% sure it is a fake review. Occasionally competitors will leave negative reviews, this is a case where ‘flagging’ the review would be appropriate. It isn’t ethical to flag a negative review that you know is true and accurate. Even after you flag the review, that doesn’t mean it will be removed. In fact, it is quite difficult to get reviews removed. Here are Google’s guidelines that the use when determining if a review should be removed or not.
If you receive a negative review online, I highly recommending responding to it. Both in public and in private. Most review websites, including Google + My Business allow you to leave a response to a review, good or bad.
People will understand that bad reviews occasionally happen. If you address the issue professionally, and take the higher road, you will gain more respect from your current and potential clients. If you find yourself taking the review personal and want to give the person that left the review a ‘piece of your mind’, then take some time to cool down. Your negative response could cause you to lose even more business.
If you have a large list of clients that you can communicate with via email, then it may be worth your time addressing the situation via email as well.
You could politely and diplomatically explain the situation, both sides of the story and the end result.
You can let your customers know how you addressed the situation and that you work each and every day to make your company better. Then you could provide a link to the review and your response to the review in the event they haven’t heard about the situation.
Some may think, hey why bring this to anybody’s attention, but trust me, you will gain more respect in your customers eyes by addressing the issue head on than by trying to sweep it under the rug. In that email you can also kindly ask them to leave a review for you and provide a link where they can do it.
In a previous blog entry I talked about some of the higher authority citation listings you will want to claim. Most of these citations allow for reviews. Google My Business is always great but a little trickier to do if you don’t have an account. Yelp, Dex, Yellowpages, Insider Pages, Manta, they are all great sources of getting reviews.
In closing, if you get a negative review, address it immediately.
Address it professionally and with respect.
Let the customer know that it is your priority to make them happy and if there is anything you can to do rectify the situation, you will be more than happy to.
Once you’ve addressed the issue, move on, don’t dwell on it, and work on getting more reviews.
It’s a never ending battle. Sometimes it makes sense to hire an online marketing company to help with this.
You need to determine if you have the time and know how to do it yourself. It not, look at hiring a professional to manage your reputation online.