No one wants to receive a bad online review.

Check your reviews and respond to all of them quick smart.

People looking to choose you are looking to see what total strangers are saying about you and they are taking the advice of those strangers.

This is why a site like Trip Advisor is so successful.

It is because we listen and take the advice from people we don’t know.

I know it doesn’t seem to make sense but this is how we are hard wired now in our belief system.

Your patients are now referring total strangers to your practice and also stopping people from coming to your practice, depending upon the review they leave online for you.

I am always very interested in the negative reviews left by disgruntled patients.

I believe that negative reviews are left because there is no service recovery at the time when we fail to deliver great customer/patient care.

Every practice at some point has slip ups in their customer service. It is what we do next to make up for it, that makes the difference and keeps people coming back and not going to online review sites to leave negative feedback.

I see a lot of negative feedback because the following happened to the patient:

• Having to wait to long
• Not having the treatment they thought they were booked in for
• No one went over the fees for the treatment
• The team were rude
• They felt ignored
• The treatment was painful

If your patient is unhappy about the level of service and care they have received, make sure you sort it out straight away while they are at the practice.

If you find out later when they leave a negative review then call them to apologise.

Speaking to the patient on the phone gives you an opportunity to listen to your patient to understand the full story and to then apologise and offer to make it up to them.

Reply in writing to the negative online review as well.

Be careful to not start making excuses for the bad service you gave your patient. I read so many responses to negative reviews that end up being an essay of writing, giving 100 reasons why it happened.

Your patient does not want your excuses and does not care why it happened. All they care about is that it happened to them and how it made them feel.

They now want to know it won’t happen again to them!

Be agreeable and make peace with them.

If you do this well your patient will accept your apology and understand that things can go wrong from time to time.

Now if they accept your apology and still don’t want to return to your practice, then you have tried your best and you lose a patient.

The gift you now have is knowing what you did wrong and to make sure you don’t make the same mistake with other patients in the future!

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This blog  features simple practical ideas that are easy to implement tomorrow in your Dental Office, impacting immediately on your Patients’ Dental  Phone Experiences, and ultimately, improving your practice profitability.

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Dental Phone Excellence is a simple to implement complete Phone Answering system I developed that helped me to build an extraordinary dental practice in the heart of working class western Sydney.

If you’d like to know more,  download my sixteen page FREE special report “How I Quickly and Easily Went From 35% to 77% New Patient Telephone Conversions, and Doubled The Size of my Dental Practice Along the Way” and discover some of the many costly mistakes being made on your phone…..

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My next live full day workshop “How to Turn Every Dental Phone Call Into A Valued and Kept Appointment”  is being held at Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast in Queensland on Friday March 24, 2017.

Click here on this link to register.

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At present I have availability for only THREE new private clients. For more information on how I can improve your Dental Office’s Phone Numbers contact me, Jayne Bandy at  jayne@theDPE.com