October 11, 2024
Written by Peter Harnish, CEO & Co-Founder of Well iQ
The phrase “reputation management” encapsulates a lot of content in two words. It can mean very different things to whoever may be talking about it. Managing one’s reputation has always been important. The entertainment industry took this very seriously to make sure that their actors always had the right spin in the media. Any business in the hospitality space needed to be aware of their reputation and make sure that their staff members were reflecting the values that made their brand unique and wanted.
Over the last fifteen years, business reputation management has become known and needed as public ratings and reviews can make or break new businesses, and help sustain current ones. Healthcare organizations are no different- they also need to worry about reputation management as Google ratings and reviews can directly impact patient population and their ability to attract and retain staff members. Healthcare practices also have unique patient challenges tied to patient outcomes that can impact public reputation.
This post will cover where reputation management started and what it has evolved to in healthcare, and how Well iQ helps address every stage of the process. Whether you are only starting your journey into managing reputation, or you have been doing it for years, there is a little something for everyone here.
The Early Days of Reputation Management
Most consumers were introduced to a business’s reputation using Yelp!, especially when it came to finding that next delicious meal at a local restaurant. As this early iteration of digital word- of- mouth marketing evolve, those reviews began to expand to all businesses, big and small, which became extremely valuable for customers looking for the best place to go for anything from restaurants and gyms to dentists, primary care doctors and beyond. Unfortunately, some bad actors started to abuse the system, placing negative reviews in the hopes of receiving something free from the business for taking them down. At the same time, the Yelp! platform began to receive negative feedback from businesses that felt like it was becoming a system that only rewarded those businesses that were paying for the platform. While this was largely debunked, consumers began to look for alternatives to getting ratings and reviews.
Google emerged as the de- facto standard for ratings and reviews, as the popularity of Yelp! began to fade. This made sense, as many people began to search for businesses using their browsers and maps on their mobile devices. This meant that having a good Google business profile was table stakes for businesses wanting to be found using search. This was one of the key contributors to the reputation management industry taking off. The early days were about how do I get five-star ratings and reviews from all my customers, and patients, which led to new rules being put in place by Google and others.
Do Not Allow Review Gating
Part of the problem was how businesses responded to the early days of Yelp! when customers were demanding businesses do something to earn their 5-star review. Flipping this on its head, businesses began to participate in a process called review gating. This meant that they were only going to ask customers, or patients, that they knew had a great experience to leave them a review. This would bypass the opportunity for any critical feedback to be given and would mislead other customers looking at that business’s ratings and reviews. All the review sites, including Google, did the right thing in making it so that this process was no longer allowed. It is important for any rating and review site to allow both positive and negative reviews so that the true details are made public and credibility exists. This also impacted the reputation management space, as many vendors were funneling reviews that were only positive to the online profiles via emails, texts, and phone calls. This effect is still seen today, as our Well iQ team helps clients who have never heard of review gating, despite contracting with reputation management companies whose job it is to know. We hold ourselves to a high ethical standard and love being able to educate others on how these reviews and rating should be gathered. It turns out that the way you earn 5- star reviews that last, is by creating an experience worthy of a five star review- who knew ☺?!
Healthcare Reputation Management – The Beginning
Like many organizations early on, the idea of dealing with an online reputation was just another thing to manage for healthcare practices. With staff members working hard to provide care for patients, this was sometimes overlooked. When Well iQ began helping healthcare organizations with feedback, including their public reputation, we recognized that automating the process was incredibly important. However, we often saw that the early days of reputation management as a whole were repeating themselves with an emphasis on five star reviews and little else. Practices were paying for a watchful eye on reputation on one or many platforms to keep the five star counts high, but were lacking visibility into the underlying causes behind those reviews, because the process was being outsourced. As Well iQ moved past our first million patient journeys served, the key was, how do we make sure our clients have visibility into these public reviews for not only the recognition, but also the opportunities to learn. Well iQ increased public ratings and reviews for all of our clients while never review gating and always putting an emphasis on the root causes of patient experience challenges, and the recognition of healthcare workers.
Moving The Needle
With a few years of reputation management behind healthcare organizations, the learnings were that the public review frequency, recency, and quality were extremely important when it came to credibility. Potential patients wanted to see a good rating, but they also wanted to make sure that those ratings were happening often based on many different patients having the same experience. This was another call for organizations to make sure that they were prioritizing the need for receiving patient feedback. Often this was done by making sure standardized surveys such as HCAHPS or other supplemental CAHPS programs were being implemented while also having a focus on the external reputation of the organization. What Well iQ saw was that as public ratings and reviewed increased, the good was always outweighing the bad. Additionally, when a patient had a bad experience- thanks to our real-time notifications- they were very impressed when a staff member was able to call them and ask what could have been done better. This showed the evolution from looking at only reviews, to looking at how the experience could improve completely.
It's Not All Rainbows
Countless times in the past, we have seen that not all feedback will be positive, but the majority of patient feedback will be positive. In fact, over 99% of patient feedback is positive and that makes it easy to recognize staff when you have a platform like Well iQ. This is great news, but what about the less than optimal scenarios? As organizations become more mature in the frequency and the way in which they engage and ask for feedback, they must also take identifying issues and digging into the root cause of those issues equally seriously. While the difference between a 4.9 and a 5 may be small, the patient experience could be greatly improved for all patients if root causes in negative patient experiences can be identified and fixed. A pain management practice that has a 4.9 out of 5 but has numerous reviews stating the waiting room chairs are uncomfortable, have a root cause that can be addressed if they are looking at the feedback. Well iQ not only has a focus on the positive aspects of public ratings and reviews and staff recognition, we allow you to analyze those patient experiences that could have been better and help identify what went wrong.
More Than a Number
Feedback is more than simply a number. When you see a survey that only asks for an overall score from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 it means you are unable to drill down to what made the experience mediocre. If the medical assistants and the providers were excellent at their job but the front desk treated the patient poorly, how can you identify that and learn from it? Reputation management is synonymous with how you get more 5 star reviews. That is not how it should be. Healthcare providers and organizations will receive 5-star reviews in an overwhelming fashion, if the patients are simply asked to provide their feedback at every touchpoint in an easy-to-use way. The essential step is to make that feedback count in both the positive and negative scenarios; recognize the staff deservedly, and analyze and address concerns when a patient express them and trends develop. Well iQ gives you all of these capabilities in an easy- to- use dashboard where you can quickly see how things are going or dive deep into the data reports to learn how each step of the patient journey is performing.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, organizations will appear at different places on the reputation management maturity curve. Some will be taking the first step in adding a platform that allows patients to easily give feedback while encouraging them to leave public reviews. Others will be at a point where identifying the root cause is the most important part of their reputation management journey, and there will be many practices somewhere in between. Well iQ has been part of over 5 million patient journeys and we have seen and heard it all. No matter where you are in your organizations reputation management journey, we are here to help you improve your public reputation, grow your patient feedback and staff recognition capabilities, and when you’re ready, we are here to help you identify and fix root causes impacting your patient experience- allowing you to be a more competitive organization focused on engaging both patients and staff.
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