The way people find and select healthcare has changed dramatically in recent years: consumers, having grown accustomed to using platforms like Google and Amazon to search for and scrutinize products, now expect a similar experience with healthcare. Patients go online to search for providers, compare treatment options, and, increasingly, read reviews left by other patients.
Part of that is because they have more opportunity: the number of online reviews left for individual healthcare providers and locations skyrocketed by 200 percent between 2019 and 2022 as the pandemic shutdowns rewired consumer expectations and accelerated the industry’s digital transformation.
Retailers were quick to adopt robust reputation management strategies that prioritized monitoring and responding to online customer reviews. And although healthcare providers were slower on the draw, more and more have come to embrace a similar approach: there was a 78 percent increase in health systems responding to reviews from 2019 to 2022.
Simply put: providers that are not responding to reviews in a timely manner — or not responding to reviews at all — are not aligned with the general healthcare industry.
So why is maintaining a reputation management strategy so important? Here are three ways in which actively monitoring and responding to patient reviews can lead to better revenue outcomes.
Reviews improve discoverability and help make a positive first impression
Increasingly, ranking well in search results requires a robust review management strategy. As more and more patients turn to the web to find healthcare options — over 70 percent of people searching for healthcare start on a search engine — third-party reviews have become table stakes for providers.
The more positive reviews left by patients, the more likely your organization is to show up at the top of search results. Google, for example, often curates the results to only show businesses that are rated four stars and above when users include the word “best” in their search. Businesses that generate an average of four to five stars see a 45 percent improvement in organic search.
But more and better reviews don’t just appeal to algorithms. A high number of positive testimonials also makes a good initial impression with patients, making it more likely they’ll navigate to your website and continue traveling down the conversion funnel. Four and five star reviews serve as social proof to a prospective patient, building trust in that provider even if the patient is unfamiliar with their services.
Feedback can be used to improve the entire patient experience
The utility of reviews goes beyond marketing. Customer reviews are stocked with rich data and that can be used to optimize every step of the patient journey.
Think of it this way: reviews offer a snapshot into the experience and impressions that an individual has of your organization. Perhaps the appointment booking process on the website was difficult to navigate, the wait time at an inpatient facility was too long or a billing error is unresolved. This is valuable information that your organization can put to use.
Of course, for larger hospitals treating thousands of patients per year, manually reading and organizing every review isn’t feasible. That’s where Sentiment Analysis comes in. Sentiment Analysis technology identifies whether a review is positive or negative, allowing providers to analyze reviews at scale and identify trends they otherwise wouldn’t.
When segmented across provider types, departments, service lines and facility locations, these trends become powerful tools for identifying and responding to opportunities for service improvements. For example, a hospital might identify that reviews regarding wait times had a high proportion of negative sentiment over a given quarter. After making procedural changes, the organization could monitor sentiment over the following quarter to gauge the effectiveness of those changes.
A reputation management program creates brand advocates
A good customer review management system doesn’t stop at monitoring feedback. It asks for it.
Review generation is the process of actively soliciting reviews from patients during or after the treatment experience. A provider might, for example, send an automated email asking about a patient’s recent appointment experience or a text message triggered after the final payment is received.
Taking the extra step to request reviews drives significant results. Not only do 70 percent of people leave a review when asked, but the reviews they leave average between 4.8 and 5 stars.
Review generation creates powerful brand advocates who amplify their positive experiences to others searching for and considering treatment options. This drives improvements across the entire revenue funnel, from bolstering search rankings and discovery to driving higher conversion rates.
That’s critical for healthcare providers facing historic revenue and retention challenges. As macro events like the pandemic, inflation crisis and labor shortage continue to hamper hospital performance, providers need to take a firm grasp of those variables that they can control.
That begins with implementing a robust online reputation management program.
Carrie Liken
Carrie Liken joined Yext as the company’s first Head of Industry for Healthcare. In her role, Liken leads all healthcare-related activities, including product and partnership development.
Over the last fifteen years, Liken has gained experience in the government, legal, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors, focusing on healthcare and health policy. For 8.5 years, she worked for Google, where she worked with healthcare organizations of all sizes to better understand the patient journey, digital’s impact on patient and customer acquisition, and how to drive increased revenue and sales through digital means.
