Handling Patient Complaints and Bad Reviews: Lighthouse 360
Using Patient Complaints to Improve Your Practice
When a patient complains or your practice gets a bad review, is your natural response to get defensive? Instead of letting negative comments get you down, use them to build a better practice. Here’s how to handle patient complaints and turn them into a learning opportunity for your team.
Why Patient Complaints Matter
Do you assume patients with complaints are just being difficult? If you’re brushing off patient complaints as isolated incidents, you’re making a big mistake. The better your patients’ experience is, the more likely they are to be loyal to your practice—and to recommend you to their friends and family. Some 70% of people who have a “good” experience with a business are likely to recommend it to others; among people who have a “very good” experience, that figure jumps to 79%.
Considering the value of referrals for dentists, you can’t afford to let your customer service slide! In a recent study, 90% of people worldwide say customer service is an important factor in their loyalty to a business.
How to Handle Patient Complaints
Start by training your employees in how to handle complaints. Here are the key steps to remember:
•Remain calm. It’s natural to get upset when someone is angry, but it’s vital to keep a cool head. Try to be sympathetic rather than reactive.
•Listen. Often, we aren’t listening because we’re busy formulating answers. Remind your staff to really listen to the complaint with an open mind. In many cases, patients simply want to vent and feel that their concerns have been heard.
•Apologize. Even if the problem has nothing to do with you, a sincere apology will go a long way toward satisfying most patients. Never make excuses.
•Suggest a solution. Work with your staff to come up with solutions for common problems or complaints. (If the problem can’t be resolved—for example, a patient is angry that she waited 30 minutes to be seen after arriving on time—promise that you will share the complaint with the doctor so the team can figure out how to prevent it from happening again.)
Ask your staff to write down any complaints they receive, including the patient, the specific complaint, time and date, the situation that sparked the complaint, and how they handled it. Create a shared document for complaints and review it with the team on a regular basis.
Take special notice of complaints that you hear from multiple patients or complaints that reveal trends. For example, do a lot of patients complain of long wait times in the afternoons? Perhaps you need to schedule more time for afternoon appointments, encourage morning appointments, or focus on making procedures more efficient.
What if the customer complaint is online? Chances are, it relates to customer service rather than the quality of your dental work. In one study, over 76% of one-star online reviews mentioned poor customer service, while over 75% of five-star reviews mentioned great customer service. When dealing with an online review, be sure you respond to it quickly. Take the conversation offline by asking the customer if you can call them to discuss it. Once you resolve the problem, ask the customer if they’d be willing to update their online review. You can also share the outcome of the problem on the review site to show other people that your office is responsive to complaints.
Why You Should Ask for Feedback
Even if patients aren’t complaining, they have complaints—they just aren’t comfortable sharing them. That’s why it’s important to conduct regular surveys of your patients. Cover key areas you are concerned about, such as wait times, ease of making appointments, friendliness of your staff, quality of care and how likely the patient is to recommend your practice to others. Always ask your patients if there’s anything they don’t like about your practice or what you could do differently to improve.
You can add surveys to your email newsletters and use Lighthouse 360 to send newsletters to custom patient lists; for example, new patients and existing patients could get different newsletters with surveys relevant to them. You can also get feedback by encouraging patients of record to review your practice online. Lighthouse 360 can automatically collect and post reviews from happy patients to Google and other major sites.
Take Action
Once you know what bothers your patients, take action to solve the problems. Lighthouse 360 can help. For instance, communication can be a major source of complaints in a dental practice. Ensure your patients never miss an appointment by automating your recall and reminders. Lighthouse 360 lets your team automatically send appointment reminders by email, text message or phone. Patients simply confirm the appointment and the confirmations are sent directly to your practice’s PMS.
Disorganized staff can lead to long wait times and unhappy patients. You can keep your front desk running smoothly by using Lighthouse 360’s front desk task list feature. It automatically creates customized task lists with smart recommendations and emails them to you every morning, so your front desk team knows what to prioritize.
Never stop listening to your patients and learning from their comments and complaints. With a little attitude adjustment, you can turn negative feedback into a positive force for improving your practice.
Original Post by Lighthouse 360