Don't miss a digital issue! Renew/subscribe for FREE today.
×
Inside Dentistry
October 2016
Volume 12, Issue 10

Team and Practice Reputation Effects

Practice-management consultant Jay Geier, founder of The Scheduling Institute, elaborates that not only must all the practice team members contribute to providing excellent customer service for existing patients, but they also must be properly trained to convert calls from potential new patients into actual appointments. “The phone call sets the bar for the patient experience in the office,” Geier says. “Your staff determines the new patient experience; that new patient experience drives your reputation; that reputation feeds online reviews; and online reviews, in turn, result in calls. It’s a cycle of things that continue to happen, but if you don’t have this one piece right, not only are you not closing those calls that come in, you’re not setting that level of excellence for the experience. Meanwhile, you’re pouring a lot of money down the drain with no concept whatsoever of how those calls convert and what happens to them.”

For the last 20 years, a variety of products such as Patterson’s EagleSoft have developed to help improve the entire customer-service experience, from basic accounting to scheduling to charting to insurance management. “Thirty years ago, the staff would pull up the rotary phone and the typewriter and those postcards,” says Dan Easty, a regional technology advisor for EagleSoft. Today, however, patients want a more sophisticated experience. “They expect it.”

“Attention to detail is part of your reputation,” says Brady. But she adds that today the details include “everything about your professional persona. It’s the performance of your team members. It’s the physical appearance of your practice. Very often in dentistry, there’s a disconnect. The dentist wants to practice really high-end, exquisite, quality-based care, and yet the carpets are frayed. I think sometimes we get so caught up in all the new stuff, we tend to forget the basics. All those little tiny details are the pieces and parts of how people come up with an opinion about you. And your reputation is really just the fancy marketing way of saying what people’s opinion of you is.”

If happy patients are still at the core of good word of mouth, what has changed, according to the marketing experts is that word of mouth alone is no longer sufficient. “When someone used to give your name out, they’d write it on a Post-it note and hand it to their neighbor or the girl in the cubicle next to them,” says Cooper. “And that person would say, ‘Okay I’m going to call.’ That’s the only thing they could do—call. Back in my 1-800-DENTIST days, people used to call us because they thought we were like the Better Business Bureau of dentists. They’d say, ‘Oh, I just want to check up on this dentist to see if he’s any good.’ They thought we were the arbiter of who the good dentists were.”

Today, Cooper continues, “When someone recommends a dentist, what’s the first thing you do? Type that name into a search engine such as Google, and your online reputation has to validate that referral because the girl sitting in the cubicle next to you maybe has teeth that don’t look that great. Or you suspect your neighbor is not that smart.” Checking out a practice’s website is akin to driving by the physical location, Cooper asserts. “Is this a good place? Does it look clean? Nice? Modern? Professional? Or is it dated? It gives people an impression of you.”

The cost of acquiring a website can vary widely, according to Brady. “There are websites that cost $500 and websites that cost $25,000. I’m not necessarily saying you need the slickest, fanciest website you can get. But you don’t want people saying, ‘Who did this? A fifth grader?’”

Data from the Levin Group confirms that 85% of patients check a practice’s website before they visit the physical presence. That includes those who don’t have a word-of-mouth recommendation but rather turn to an Internet search engine to find dental care. Advice about how to ensure that one’s business shows up on the first page or two of search results (so-called search-engine optimization or SEO) has generated an entire industry and a large body of literature, some of it specific to dentists.1 “A lot of things matter,” says Levin. “Video raises your SEO. Links raise your SEO; having more searches raises your SEO; certain key words. You have to know what the rules are and play accordingly to get the best results.” He adds that Levin Group research indicates that around 45% of practices currently are paying for assistance with these SEO tasks “because they don’t know how to do it themselves.”

“It’s cyclical,” Geier agrees. “The web, Yelp, SEO—all those things impact the number of calls that you get. The number of calls is what drives the number of new patient opportunities handled by your team. Your team drives your experience; your experience drives your reputation. The better you are at the experience, the more your online presence gets fed with positive reviews.”

Soliciting and Managing Reviews

Regardless of how a prospective patient finds his or her way to a practice’s website or social media profiles, he or she is likely to pay attention to reviews from other patients. The 2015 BrightLocal Consumer Review Survey, which included responses from 2,354 individual consumers in the United States and Canada, found that 92% of the respondents reported reading online reviews, compared to 88% in 2014.2 Moreover, dentists and doctors came in second only to restaurants when the survey participants were asked about which type of businesses they read online reviews for. When asked to select up to three types of businesses for which reputation mattered the most, an equal of consumers (47% of all those surveyed) picked doctors/dentists and restaurants.

© 2024 BroadcastMed LLC | Privacy Policy