Posted on July 20, 2016 in General
The Power of Reviews Revisited, Part Two
Unlike our usual blog posts, this is part of a short series which feature an interview with Michael Dobkowski, Product Manager of the reputation management software MDidentity. I spoke with Dobkowski because I wanted to revisit the topic of one of our previous blogs, the power of reviews, and with his unique insight he proved to be an excellent source of information. If you would like his advice about managing your online reputation, contacting him is easy, and his knowledge and expertise in this area are hard to match.
Last time, Dobkowski explained that having no reviews is worse for you than having a negative rating, because people are likely to “go right past” a listing with no rating or reviews. And that raises the question, how can a new doctor or new practice with no reviews yet get themselves on the map? Dobkowski answered that and a lot more.
Increasingly, we all depend on perusing reviews of everything from jeans to plumbers, but who in the world has the time to write one? I’ve had great service and terrific coffee from a cafe nearby, and I have been meaning to write a nice Yelp review of the place for over a year, but I only seem to think of it when I don’t have the time to. Here is Dobkowski’s strategy for taking that out of the equation altogether.
Anything to take advantage of having patients in the office – try to have people do it then and there. Don’t just give them a card and ask them to write a review when they get home. The stats on that are so low – If you give out a thousand cards, getting 5 reviews out of that thousand is doing very, very well. And it has nothing to do with the desire to follow through, it has everything to do with just simply life.
When it comes to reviews, you have to do them now, you have to put it in front of somebody and get them to do this at this moment. That’s why email campaigns are good, but not incredibly effective. The average return on an email campaign is 20-22%. Getting 22 people to respond is not bad. But if that email just sits there, the chances of them following through gets less and less, every hour, every day.
That’s why I always encourage people to do in-office reviews. Someone’s coming in for their post-op, you have the time to sit down and talk with them anyway… “Here, if you don’t mind, we’d love to hear what you have to say.” And it’s in the moment and top of mind, it’s a great opportunity. But most practices don’t have a strategy in place to capitalize on that moment.
Michael Dobkowski had more to share, so please keep an eye out for our upcoming blog post as we revisit the power of reviews.
