Protecting Your Reputation: 8 Steps to a Stronger Brand
You’re familiar with the concept: deliver a great experience and the patient tells one person; make the smallest mistake, and the same patient tells seven people (and often in a voice that everyone around them hears it, too.)
Bad news travels fast, and in our digital age, the hit to your reputation is happening in more quickly, and in more places, than most healthcare organizations think.
You can have a world-class facility, employing the most talented clinicians and professionals, giving each and every patient 50% more customized attention than anyone else. But when what people SAY is more powerful than what you DO, your reputation impacts your bottom line.
Reputation isn’t what you say about your care and services, it’s what others say about their experience of your care and services that influences future patients.
Why They Say what They Say
A negative review doesn’t just appear. The number one reason that most patients will take their complaints online? You aren’t listening.
Small things are just that, and can be written off by most. But even minor slights, miscommunications, or offenses can rapidly escalate into an event your patient wants to tell the world about.
In a 2018 study by the Brookings Institute, reviewers were just as likely to base provider choices on non-clinical ratings as they are on clinical ratings. (Interestingly, your non-clinical performance is more powerful when it comes to female patients researching options.)
Studies have also shown that the 80% of all consumers ages 18-34 year old have left a business review. For many health and wellness organizations, this means that you potentially are missing out on the bulk of potential patient lifetime value when young people go elsewhere for services.
You aren’t losing just a visit. You may be losing a potential patient for life.
The Value of Reputation
You’re familiar with the concept of priming: when given biased information or perspectives in advance of an experience, we are more likely to notice this in our experience. Negative online reviews lead to negative patient experiences, which lead to poor patient satisfaction surveys.
It’s not just that negative reviews will impact the number of patients that come to you (some don’t have a choice), but research from Accenture shows that hospitals that deliver an exceptional patient experience can see up to 50% higher margins in services.
So what if your reputation is tarnished?
Eight (8) Steps to a Strong Brand
The good news is that there are steps you can take to better manage and influence your public reputation. Some are harder (because it’s about how you engage patients each and ever day), and some focus on monitoring the horizon. We’ve developed this short list of actions you can start taking today.
Know your reputation in your market today. You need a baseline if you are going to measure and monitor your reputation (because after all, we improve what we measure, right?).
Start by simply google your organization’s name - not your url - and see what reviews show up. Anything listed on the first 2-3 pages will influence perceptions of your brand. (You can also do this for your executives, and key staff and providers.)
Remember, too, that the top Google placement gets 33% more clicks than other listings.
Who is talking about their experience or your services?
Where are they saying it, and who is noticing it?
Finally, a lack of reviews can be seen as a neutral signal for potential patients, suggesting your services simply aren’t noteworthy - something you can fix.
Set expectations for the Patient Experience early. If someone is going to prime patients for their experience at your clinic, it should be YOU. Work with your schedulers, patient navigators, and front-desk staff to ensure that reasonable expectations are set up front.
Patients often equate consistent processes to a reliable, trustworthy experience. Constant changes in your process can be interpreted as unpredictable, and by extension, unreliable.
Always ask, “Is there anything else we could have done today to make your visit better?” The act of simply asking shifts the patient perception. (Granted, you need to be prepared to capture the feedback and funnel it into a review and improvement process.) This simple, personal, verbal, intentional interest in the patient’s well-being communicates your interest.
When this is the patient’s parting exchange with you at a visit, they leave feeling the visit was more personalized, more empathetic, and a perception of a more trusting experience.
Turn Disappointment into Delight. While most satisfaction surveys have now been automated, they miss the key point: an opportunity to correct mistakes or misunderstandings before your patient leaves your clinic.
If organizations can get patients to verbalize and discuss disappoints BEFORE they leave, we have an opportunity to not just fix it, but flip a negative experience into a positive one.
Monitor your digital footprint for negative reviews or publicity. There are dozens of strategies for monitoring your digital reputation, but most focus on erasing negative feedback, or simply identifying when it shows up.
As a care organization, these negative reviews can and should be used as an opportunity to address problems that got missed. Often, the concerns that do show up are issues that have substance behind them, like poor service quality of under-performing staff or providers.
Your goal in monitoring isn’t to erase or debate the patient’s experience, but to understand what motivated them enough to make the effort. Your investment in this analysis can be invaluable.
Make reputation monitoring a strategic conversation. Design and maintain a cadence of scheduled reviews, analysis, and responses to negative reviews or commentary. Ensure that an ongoing report out is being provided at both the executive and board level.
Enable Patients to share their reviews. When you have 1 - 2 out of 100 folks providing negative feedback, it does little to tarnish your brand. When you only have 2-3 reviews that are all negative, you are letting others define you.
When negative reviews fall down the list, they carry less influence. Leading organizations make visible efforts to help patients share their epxerience online. Reduce the barriers to getting good reviews by setting up kiosks in your lobby, or making tablet devices available BEFORE PATIENTS LEAVE THE CLINIC so that the experience is fresh in their mind.
Enroll your employees and providers in reputation management. Your good reputation should be treated as a powerful organizational asset, and something everyone has a role in caring for.
Make it easy for all employees and providers to capture and route concerns, as well as raise questions when they observe activities or practices that can compromise your brand.
Many organizations use independent third-parties to act as “ombudsman,” or a trusted and neutral party that maintains confidentiality while still escalating issues that need to be addressed.
(Okay, a bonus!) Celebrate patient experiences that are positive. Leading healthcare organizations celebrate those evangelists that love their services. You can be very intentional about the patient stories you tell, and where you tell them. It’s not enough to post these to your own website or managed social media accounts; make an effort to share these stories more broadly, and help very-satisfied patients share stories of their experience.