Reputation Management
and the Veterinary Practice in 2011
What is reputation management you ask? It’s the active management and control on what your community thinks of you and your practice. It’s the ongoing process of building, repairing, and shifting of your reputation within your community of animal owners and related businesses.
Why is this important?
Because like never before, using the internet, the potential and existing clients go onto the web to check you out and run into the opinions of others that are posted on review websites. If the opinions are good then their decision to use you is supported by someone like themselves, which is what you want. But if the opinions they encounter are bad then these can cause their attraction to your practice to come into question and in many cases have them to look elsewhere.
Don’t think you’ve got a problem?
Think again and go and google your practice. Look for Yahoo! Local and Yelp reviews. You may be shocked at what’s out there for all to see.
Bad reviews generally come about from clients leaving your practice upset but they can also about from employees leaving your practice with unstated upset. In the old days they’d tell 15 – 17 other people in a one-to-one fashion. Now they go onto the web and tell thousands, including your good clients that may experience a dilution of their loyalty on reading these.
The managing of such opinions, both good and bad, fall under this subject of Reputation Management.
Here are some basic rules to start with:
1. Don’t let clients leave your practice upset. Period. Sit with them in private and work out their concerns with good communication skills. The skillful art of a well delivered acknowledgement plays a large role in calming an upset.
2. Check your web reviews weekly to find any negative reviews FAST.
3. Have your good clients routinely posting good reviews on the review sites.
Sounds simple? It is. Try it out and watch what happens. You
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