6 Ways for a Private Practice Business to Handle Negative Reviews

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6 Ways for a Private Practice Business to Handle Negative Reviews

It doesn’t matter how amazing your service is, it could even be the best in town. But, you’re still going to get negative customer reviews, on way or another.

It’s how you handle these reviews that will determine whether you’re successful or not. To help you take advantage of these situations, here are six ways to handle negative reviews as a private practice owner.

1. Getting Rid of Your Critics

When you respond to the negative reviews, things can get ugly very quickly. Try to keep your responses short and sweet and don’t mention any specifics in regard to the problem. Just move the conversation out of the public eye and deal with it.

For example, you can say, ‘We’re sorry to hear you had this experience. We would love to investigate and make things better. Please email us at this address’. And then leave the review alone.

2. Encourage Positive Feedback

One way to drown out any negative reviews you have is by encouraging your patients with good reviews to speak up about them. If you have 90 good reviews and 10 bad, you’ll have a 90% customer satisfaction rating, which is really good.

It can be easy to want get fake reviews, just to cover up the bad ones, such as the ones of websites like Trust Pilot and Site Jabber. But, this isn’t recommended, as being caught can lead to your business and accounts being in more trouble.

3. Using SERPs

SERPs stands for Search Engine Results Page. If you don’t have great reviews on one website, try and build up your positive reviews on another website to then outrank the other website.

“You can do this by Googling your business to see what comes up and which other review sites are related to your business. Even if you build up one site and not the other, at least you’ll have balanced reviews, which is far better than just bad” – explains Karen Burgess, a Marketing Manager at Assignment Help.

4. Improve Using Negative Reviews

Of course, if you’re receiving negative reviews, why are you receiving them? What are your customers not happy about? One of the most honourable things you can do is to go through your negative reviews and see whether they are true and whether you can improve your business.

You may also want to check whether this reviewer comments on lots of company’s and just tries to pull them down either as a troll or even as a competitor.

5. Communication is Key

As a rule of thumb, always reply to every single review, whether it’s good or bad. This shows that you care about your customers and provide the best experience you possibly can, even after they have used your service. Other customers will see this on the review websites.

To make things really easy and to make sure you approach these customers in the best way, here are some writing tools you can use to help.

Easy Word Count – this is a free online tool you can use to make sure you don’t drag your responses out and keep them simple and to the point.

Type My Essay – this is an online writing agency you can use to help guide you through the process of writing heartfelt responses to both your good and bad reviews.

State of Writing – is a free online blog that’s overflowing with content, posts, and articles on how to use grammar properly and correctly in your responses.

Essay Roo – this online writing agency is home to a collection of professional writers who can help you to proofread and edit your responses, so they make sense and seem genuine.

Cite It In – if you’re writing in a quote, for example, from the manager of the business or from a certain department, add these quotes professionally using Cite It In.

Paper Fellows – this is an online writing agency that will create your review responses on your behalf, saving you the time while leaving you safe in the knowledge that they’re done properly.

6. Get the Review Removed

If worse comes to worse, you can always contact the website hosting the review and ask them to take it down. Of course, if the review is legitimate, then they won’t unless you have a special reason.

However, if the review is unjust and you have proof, you’ve got a pretty good case to have it removed.

Although receiving negative reviews can be heart-breaking, especially when it’s your own business, it doesn’t have to be the be all and end all. There are solutions you can take to make things better.

 

Gloria Kopp is an ecommerce marketing manager and a content writer at Academized. She is a contributing expert writer at Huffingtonpost and UK Writings blog. Besides, Gloria is an author of Studydemic blog where she writes her online reviews for students and educators.