With all the social media outlets, online review sites, and other online outlets, your and your practice are vulnerable to the occasional bad review or disappointed customer that voice their opinion online. No matter how hard you try, or how good you are at your practice, there is always going to be that one person that is unhappy. So, how do you avoid this and how do you manage it if it does happen to you?
- Educate. We talk about it all the time here at AAI. Educating your patients is the number one tool to keep patients satisfied. The more they know, the better they are going to feel about the overall experience.
- Set expectations. If a 50-year old comes in and has the expectation that you can make them look 25, and the results are not what they expected, then they are not going to be pleased with the service. If you set the expectation that they may not look 25 but talk them through what they can expect, they are more likely to come out of the experience happier. Visions are very subjective, so talk with your patients and get on the same page before performing any treatment.
- Don’t get greedy. These patients are coming to you in a vulnerable state. It’s not easy for people to ask others to “fix” a part of their body that they see as a problem. If you are just taking advantage of the patient, chances are they will ultimately be unhappy.
- No pressure. If your patients come to you and are very nervous, don’t pressure them into getting the treatment. If they are already nervous, they will be nervous after the treatment as well, and may find themselves unhappy with the results. You want your patients to be excited about getting this done, and they will be ultimately more pleased with the overall experience.
- If they can’t afford, or don’t want to do the full treatment that you recommend, tell them to come back. For example, if you think they need 3 treatments, but they can only afford 1, tell them to come back when they can afford all 3. As you know, after that 1 treatment, they will not typically get the results that they want from all 3 treatments, so they are likely to be unhappy when their expectation is not met. Setting expectations is again, key.
- Ask your clients to write Yelp reviews: We know that most of your customers leave happy. Ask them to write about their experience online if it is not too much trouble. Nothing minimizes the impact of one person’s bad experience like 20 people’s raving reviews.
Even if you take all the necessary precautions to avoid an unhappy customer, sometimes it just can’t be helped. When you do have one of these unhappy customers, invite them back in, talk to them about why they are unhappy, and provide them with a solution that could help them. Do not avoid them, but confront them. Talking to them in person is usually the best option to avoid any backlash.