Philip Molden explains the value of reviews for your dental practice and the importance of being proactive, not reactive, when faced with negative feedback.
How did you get into dentistry?
I was in the music industry for a number of years and in PR too. I had a friend that I met when we were studying marketing – John – who’s now my business partner.
He had this idea a fair while ago, before the advent of everything online, where he said, ‘wouldn’t it be a great idea if we could give businesses a way of being able to promote themselves, but not through an advert through what their customers say?’
I think the only people that were doing it at the time was eBay.
It just goes to show how original it was at the time. We batted things back and forward and came up with this idea. It was very different to what we did but eventually evolved into Working Feedback.
But as I said, I was in PR then and I was in the legal sector in marketing and business development. John’s side was tech and sales. So we were not only good friends, but we kind of complemented each other on the skills that we had.
Here we are 17 years later where we now focus on healthcare.
What do you do and what services do you provide?
We started specialising within the dental sector from 2012. What we do is provide a solution that takes care of every element of feedback. This means the whole process from collection, moderation, publishing online, social media etc. We can automate the whole process.
For example, we’re top tier partners with Software of Excellence and Dentally. Within a few clicks you can automate this whole process.
So when you are updating your practice management software, um, you don’t need to do anything else – you just complete treatment and the whole system will kick in.
When that happens, we then moderate and publish the reviews. We collect Google reviews and we also create widgets so that the reviews are dynamically updated on your website.
So again, there’s nothing else you need to do. It just happens. You stand out for the right reasons going forward.
Why are reviews so important for practices?
We all look at reviews, from deliveries all the way through to buying a car. It’s what we do to make this considered purchase and dental practices and dental treatment certainly come under that.
This is something very specialist. It’s about your health, it’s about your appearance.
So reviews are just an element of reassurance and credibility.
It’s kind of unusual if you don’t have them now to a certain extent. There used to be a multitude of directories that had lots of reviews and you just couldn’t trust them because they’d be so sporadic. Some would be negative, some would be positive, so you couldn’t get a genuine and valid opinion.
But nowadays, because it’s much more focused, it really helps people make a decision and feel good about it.
How can practices look to grow reviews?
Firstly you need to do something. That sounds like a flippant comment, but you’d be surprised at how many wonder, ‘where do we start? How do we get the reviews?’
It’s kind of obvious when you say it, but with a dental practice, you have the most valuable resource for a review walking in and out of your practice every single day. The front of house may ask how it all went but it’s the ability to capture how the patient feels.
So that’s why I say you’ve got to start doing something. Start small. Just ask patients when they’re just about to leave if you can capture their experience in written form. Obviously if it’s done impartially, of course it’s stronger. But start small so you get into the habit of that.
The other thing that is big for dental practices is Google reviews. There are a few difficulties with this because you can’t get Google reviews from everybody.
It’s in this scenario that we hear time and time again: ‘I’ve spoken to the patient, they love us and they’d love to leave a review. They said they’ll do it when they get home.’
Often they get distracted and it gets forgotten about because there’s no process, there’s no follow up – it just gets lost. It’s quite discouraging as well.
Video testimonials again are another thing that are a little bit easier than they used to be. But again, it takes time and not a lot of people like getting in front of a camera and giving their opinion.
But start small, look at other processes – that’s the most important thing. But, but the other element as well is collate some of the information that you’ve got.
How can dental practices handle negative reviews?
This is another thing that is not rocket science! Reality check – It is going to happen. You will get a negative review of some description, at some stage.
People are often more likely to leave a negative review and that’s because they’re motivated to do it. A lot of the time the place they will do this is Google reviews. The most important thing is that you are not reactive, you are proactive. Have a process in place and be proactive as opposed to reactive.
You’ve got to expect that there will be some constructive and potentially negative feedback. But it’s what you do with it most important thing.
Because as a potential patient, I’m looking at these reviews that have been collected and replied to. I’m going to go down there and I’m going to look at this list.
If a review is totally inaccurate, how do you handle it?
With our service, we moderate every review that comes in. To use a comparison between a delivery service and a dental practice – if your package is late or it’s left at the doorstep, you kind of expect it to happen.
However, if you’ve got a negative review for a dental practice when the treatment hasn’t gone as it should have, for example, that has a hugely detrimental impact. That’s why it’s important to moderate and we make sure that there’s a level of fairness in this.
We have that further investigation where it will go into a stage where they have the opportunity to give their side. Now in the cases where it’s plainly wrong and there’s genuine evidence for that, we have to have an audit trial.
In the case of Google reviews, these are slightly different. What we can’t do is stop a Google review going live onto Google. That’s because it’s Google!
The advice I give to all of the practices, is don’t let it sit there. Think about it and make sure that you respond – even with a ‘thanks for the review and I’m so sorry to hear this, but we can’t quite identify you as a patient’.
The relevance of having a process in place means that you know what’s going on. If a business is not dealing with them and not being proactive, negative reviews will often snowball.
For more information visit www.workingfeedback.co.uk
