From Reviews to Revenue: Maximizing Patient Feedback to Increase EBITDA

Key Takeaways

• Negative reviews can decrease your practice’s revenue by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• Staff noncompliance, limited time in the day, and discomfort in asking for reviews are the leading points of failure in executing a successful review strategy.
• Leveraging patient feedback to create meaningful experiences and improvements can minimize negative reviews and increase revenue

The majority of patients will leave your practice after their procedure or appointment without giving you their honest feedback. They will, however, share their experience with their friends and family—especially if it was mediocre or negative.

The fact is that one bad experience is much more powerful than a positive one. Consistently poor reviews deter patients from choosing your practice, directly impacting your bottom line. Lack of consistency in positive reviews can also raise a red flag, sending them elsewhere.

In this week’s blog, we explore how to harness the power of both positive and negative patient feedback to improve your practice experience and profitability.

5 Ways are Reviews Impacting Your Bottom Line

Consumers today value transparency, and reviews have become one the best ways that they can get an unbiased look at products and services that they are considering. In fact, almost 70% of purchasing decisions are made based on reviews alone.

The impact of a single negative review can be greater than you think. Negative reviews can lead to:

• Revenue Loss. Reports show that businesses with consistent 1-2 star reviews reported 33% less revenue.
• Poor Practice Reputation. 50% of patients question the quality of a practice with negative reviews and, once you’ve lost the credibility of your practice, it can be difficult to regain that trust.
• Loss of Patients to Your Competitors. Studies show that a single negative review can drive away 22% of your potential patients—and that number increases with every additional review added.
• Poor Search Ranking, Making it Harder to Find You. Say goodbye to your SEO investment! Search engines today want to serve up only what they consider the most trusted companies and reviews play a significant role in that determination.
• Overall Decrease in Profitability. Add it all up and your practice is seeing a decrease in profitability across the board.

Think about it: if you lost 22% of your prospective patients to a negative review, how does that impact you in dollars and cents?

Let’s say you’re generating $1.5M in annual revenue in your practice at present, and this is only 78% of your earning potential. This means that you’re missing out on over $330K in additional annual revenue just because you didn’t invest in your review strategy.

What’s holding your practice back from harnessing reviews to increase your profitability?

Addressing Friction Points in the Review Roadmap

We hear it time and time again: practices that struggle to implement and maintain a review strategy that generates consistent, high-quality positive reviews on the right channels.

In working with oral surgery practices for over a decade, we’ve seen the same themes emerge and contribute to this struggle:

• Staff noncompliance and discomfort in asking for reviews
• Not enough time in the day to consistently implement your plan
• Staff turnover, leading to poor retraining on your review strategy
• No strategy or plan to address negative feedback in the practice

The good news is that every single point above can be quickly addressed and eliminated with the right strategies and tools in place.

Building a Successful Review Strategy

Automate The Process

Eliminate staff noncompliance and the never-ending feeling as though there isn’t enough time in the day to get it done by automating your review process. Solutions like WUWTA integrate directly with your practice management system to send review requests to patients at exactly the right time in their recovery process. This ensures that 100% of your patients get a review request, as opposed to just the ones that your staff has time for.

Harness the Prescriptive Power of the Doctor

Now that you’ve made it easy to request reviews, take the process of asking for a review out of your team’s hands. We’ve found that harnessing the prescriptive power of the doctor throughout care leads to better care compliance, and the same goes for reviews! In fact, the vast majority of negative reviews say good things about their doctor and poor things about their experience with billing or the team.

Worried about how you’ll make time to do this? Record a personalized video of yourself that is sent to patients with your review request. This allows you to control the narrative, ensuring the right thing is said to your patients every time—video never has a bad day!

Celebrate the Wins

How are you motivating your team to continue to produce great reviews? Sit down with your team regularly to reinforce the importance of reviews and create an outstanding patient experience. In your morning huddle or weekly team meeting, pull up all of the reviews that your practice has received and read them aloud. When your team hears the positive feedback patients are leaving about their experience, they are more satisfied with their work and motivated to continue creating more of the same.

A bonus—high staff satisfaction levels result in less team turnover, saving your practice thousands of dollars in the process of replacing and retraining your team.

Collect & Address Negative Feedback Before It Gets Posted

One way to avoid negative reviews is to make sure that feedback is collected before it ever goes up online. Implementing a patient satisfaction survey in your practice gives patients an outlet to share issues offline and provides your practice the ability to address them on the spot, potentially turning the experience into a positive one. Gather and review negative feedback on a monthly basis with your team so you can put the right changes in place to avoid negative experiences in the future.

Don’t have time to survey patients yourself? Explore services like SIXSTAR Reputation, which will collect every patient and aggregate your feedback data for you.

Invest in the Patient Experience

How are you ensuring that patients truly have a 5-star experience every time? Practices that invest in creating these experiences make it even easier to generate positive reviews that bring new patients in the door.

Practices harnessing the power of WUWTA are creating experiences and setting the expectation for their standard of care before the patient ever walks through the door. Providing patients with all of the information they need at every step of care ensures that they feel confident in their choice, can maximize their time with their doctor to discuss the things they really care about, and enjoy better treatment outcomes.

Take Me from Reviews to Revenue

Are you ready to take action and harness the power of positive reviews to increase the revenue of your practice? We’re ready to show you how!

Click the button below to request a 30-minute presentation of WUWTA and see how this platform can transform your patient experience and dramatically increase your positive review conversion.