Increase Patient Referrals

Foreign. What is going on, everybody? It's your boy Troy Cole and my dude, Michael King. What's up, Mike?

How are we doing? I'm doing great, man. How's your day been?

I'm doing good, man. I'm loving this video series that we're doing because we're getting into all, like, all the nuts and bolts, all the. All the gold nuggets, if you will, for finding the hidden assets in your practice and then optimizing those and leveraging those to continue to grow your surgery volume, continue to get more leads in the door. Right. Continue moving the direction that you want to move. And right now, in this video, we're going to talk about what it looks like to leverage a hidden asset of yours, which is your happy patients. Your happy patients are one of the most valuable assets that you have within the practice. Right. They've come through the process. They, they know all the info. They had a great result. You've taken great care of them. Right. And a lot of times it's like, okay, that's cool. Great. Thank you so much. Right. But we want them out there being evangelists for the practice, sharing the good word. Right. Sharing what they now know and believe about you and the procedures that you offer. There's a couple different ways that are pretty common to do that, and I want to make sure that we're doing those the right way. And that's patient referrals and it's patient reviews. Mike.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot for us to kind of talk through here, but from a mindset perspective, I'm a huge believer and being able to have this conversation with patients when they're most euphoric, what I mean by that is, well, let me back up. Number one, if the first time that somebody is hearing, hey, would you like to leave us a review or leave us a referral is after surgery and you haven't set it up before they have surgery. That's a missed opportunity. What do I mean by that? I mean that it's like, hey, Jane, here at ABC Practice, we really are passionate about the patient care that we give, and we want to give five star service to everybody. So one of the things that we do is your concierge at the one day or one week Mark is going to sit down with you and kind of, let's just hear how our experience was, and if you found it was to be a five star experience, we want to hear about it. Conversely, if you're not happy or something's not quite right, we want you to let us know about that as well. Does that sound fair to you? Yes. Why do I do that or why do I recommend you do something like that? Because then it sets the frame that coming after they have surgery, you're going to be asking them for, you know, that conversation. And I think that really makes it a natural way to be able to do that. And then to me, why do I want to get them when they're most euphoric? Because that is when they're most happy, you know, at the one day, one week mark is when they're super excited about the procedure.

Let's talk about the actual like, reviews and where we need reviews. There's a lot of places to leave reviews. We're big proponents of like, if you search your name and there's a, there's a page, there's a site on page one and, and it's a review site, you need to have at least a four star average. Okay, this is me getting very tactical with you. If something shows up for your practice or for one of your providers on page one, you need at least a four star average with at least 10 reviews on that site. You want people scrolling that page and seeing nothing but four and five stars. Right? So that might be rating these, that might be health grades, it might be whatever, whatever showing up. We need to steer some reviews there. We'll talk about how to do that here in a second. There's the number one review site. Okay. Which may not be a surprise to anyone. Here is Google. Right? Google reviews are the coin of the realm in our modern society. I want to give you a few data points around Google reviews and why it's so important and just reviews in general, right? Reviews. 95% of customers read online reviews before buying a product. All right, that's from Global Newswire. 94% say reviews have made them avoid a business. Okay, so it's not just the fact that you need Google reviews to go out and show people like, hey, here's what the experience is like, here's what actual people say about us, right? But at the same time, if you don't have them or they're, they're, you don't have that many or that's a. They're, they're like generally mediocre or bad. People will use that and say, hey, look, I'm not going to go check this place out. I'm going to go somewhere else. Right? 49% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. That's based on a survey from bright local 49%. Half of people look at an online review and say, that's worth about as much as what my brother told me who went there. That's crazy to me. But that's what the data shows us, right? So when we look at that kind of data, right, when it comes to online reviews, like, it is absolutely key to make sure that we are not just have a few reviews and, you know, we're moving on with our life, but we have an actual plan in place to go out there and get the reviews that we need and we can implement that and utilize that in an ongoing fashion.

Yelp has such good organic rankings. It's one that I think is overlooked by a lot of practices. Don't get me talking on Yelp, but for Google, a goal if you could have, if you're a busy, thriving practice, try to have four and a half stars and above. And if you can get 100 reviews on Google, why? Because that is like an avalanche of social proof. And I think that, I agree with Troy that, you know, having, you know, four stars and 10 for all the other ones is great. But try to go for Google to be over four and a half if you can, because a lot of your competition, especially in the ophthalmology space, you can, I can assure you that they're going to be doing the same thing. Thoughts? Trey?

The thing with Google is like, Google is visible no matter what you're doing online. Like, for example, someone may just be looking up your. Your listing on the map to get to your office. They're going to see your reviews. There's no way around it. Someone might look up your phone number to call you. What are they going to see on Google? They're going to see your reviews right there, front and center. So it's so vital to make sure that you're maximizing your reviews there. So I totally agree. Like, Google's where you need to dump all of your review efforts once those other boxes are checked. That I talked about. There's also something else that we, that we didn't discuss here. We talked about the marketing aspect, right? I mean, when you have hundreds of reviews, like, you know, we Talked about like 50 million Elvis fans can't be wrong. Like, you have all these reviews. It's like, God, man, these guys must know what they're doing. Like, these reviews are great. And, and somebody left one yesterday. Like, and two people left one the day before. Like, they're doing a lot of stuff over there and people really love it, right? So it's a great marketing channel, but it also can help improve your online presence. Right.

I wanted to ask you a question. Here is what yes to that point. And I actually find that when it comes to your website, all the positive reviews that you've got, you can be able to feature those on your homepage. Like here's what other patients are saying and on your landing pages because that helps to convert patients in their journey, if you will. So leveraging those types of reviews. And I'm not just saying written reviews. We'll talk just real quickly about testimonial videos. To me, I think that that's a major missed opportunity for most practices that they don't get enough reviews in video format because and I like to follow a process that does three things. Number one is have them and you could do it via their telephone at home. Doesn't have to be in your practice. But what was life like before? Insert procedure. What's your life like now? And what would you say to a friend or family member who's considering this procedure? If you can get your testimonials to build a video testimonials to kind of go on that I think that you'll find they have a really good format for that. I wanted to, Troy, now kind of pivot and talk about the how, like how do we actually get these reviews? And I'll have you talk a little bit about the digital side and automating with various technology. But I want to talk about the human to human approach just real quick and something that I have seen effective on how to be able to get a review or a referral, especially around the review side. I had a surgeon who would say, hey, did you find the reviews helpful when you were researching our practice? I mean that's the gist of it. Versus hey, could you leave us a review and we'll give you a T shirt. Right? Like people will give more energy and more emotion and more power passion behind doing something to be helpful than it is because you're going to give them a, you know, and I don't even recommend you incentivize to get reviews, but really, you know, you want to think about doing it because they really want to be able to do that and there's ways to be able to get that. Let's talk Troy, about the how we actually get reviews beyond just asking people to do that. What are some of the things that you've seen on how we can automate this process to be able to increase referrals and reviews?

Yeah, absolutely. So timing is key. You mentioned that like, we don't want to do this three months later. Do it when they're at the, you know, height of delight, as some people like to call it. And for, and look for different procedures that's going to be different. For Lasik, it might be the next day or the next week for a procedure that takes a longer recovery time, say prk. I'm not asking you for a PRK review at a one week post op. Like you're going to be like, I hate these guys guts. This is awful, right? But a month later it's like, this is great. I'm so glad I did it, you know, so think about your timing. But following up with folks afterwards, you can again, automation, we've talked about that several times in the series. You can have an automated system that sends out a text message asking for that review after their, you know, after their, you know, xyz one day, one week post op, when they get marked as like happy, like you mark down your system, boom. It blasts off a review request, right? You can, you can batch these up, right? Maybe you don't have a way to automate it, but you was like, okay, well we, we saw these 15 post op this week, we're going to take it, we're going to send that out to them all at one time, right? So that's another way that you can batch it and save some time. There, there are different softwares that we utilize for, for asking for these reviews. Like you can do all that manually. But there are also softwares that will automate this and even send a couple of requests depending on whether or not somebody opened the email or clicked the link in a text message. Right. And so we like those as well. I will say that one of my favorite ways to get reviews and one of the most effective ways goes back to something Michael mentioned which is like he, the doc tees it up and the doc asked for it. But getting people to leave reviews when they're in the office and building that into part of your post operative visit and the goal there not is just to get the review, but also to get a very high quality review. So it's one thing to have a five star review that says these guys are great. I'm so happy. Okay, that's cool. But that doesn't really tell a prospective patients too terribly much. But if we're able to answer the three questions that Michael said, you know, what were you dealing with before? What's life like now? And what would you tell somebody else? That's a great framework for the testimonial and for the review. So if we can have that conversation with someone. Hey, so tell me like, what was it like before? Awesome. And so like, tell me what your vision's like now. What are you doing? Oh, you're running. Oh, you're doing this. You're swimming. You got a fishing trip with your kids. Awesome. And then asking them to tell that story in the review, you've done a couple things right. Number one, you've created a much more high value review. You've created a testimonial in a review.

Right.

But then number two, you've helped feed and develop what you want them to say. Okay. It's not just like sometimes it's like, I love this business. What do I now I gotta write a review. We've all done this. You get on the writer review and it's like you kind of write some and you're like, how does this sound? Good? Does it not sound good? Oh, you just want me to tell my story. That's easy enough. I like it. I like talking about jotting. I'll talk about it, you know, and so they got this big long review, paragraphs long of somebody talking about something they clearly love and how you change their life for the better so they could do it even more. Right. That's how you get the high quality review. So, you know, leverage the automation and do those pieces. If you're able to work that into a post operative visit, literally having that conversation. Great. Scan this QR code here. Awesome. Did that go to our page? Cool. Yeah. Thank you so much for leaving that review. That'll be helpful to us and it'll certainly be helpful to other patients. I'm gonna go get your paperwork done so you don't have to visit the front desk when we leave. I'll be back in a couple of minutes. Thanks so much for doing that. And then you leave and they leave the review before they've ever even stepped out your door. Right. Great way to get a lot in high quality reviews.

Anything about encouraging reviews in clinic that you've seen effective that, you know, like sort of the visual prompt, if you will, of. Of that you can have for patients in clinic.

Yeah, I like the little table toppers. We use those. Some people have a table topper that's either a QR code or an. I think it's called nf. Is it nft or the near field thing where you just touch your phone to it and it like pops up the screen? Yeah, that's just an easy way to do it. What, you don't want that. You want to have some easy way for somebody to get to your listing very quickly.

Totally.

So it's like you scan the QR code or you get the text message and you click the link and boom, they're on with a screen open to put the five stars in and leave the comment versus leave us a review. And so they got to go to Google and then find the thing and then click on it and then open the other screen. Like, don't make them click 5 times. If you can make them click once. And so those are great. But again, like calling their attention to it at the post op is the most effective way to make that happen. You just reach for that, scan the QR code, boom. Now, now we're in the system and you can leave that review.

Quick tip. I would not recommend if you're going to have asking or if you're encouraging people to leave reviews while they're in the clinic, make sure that they're not on your WI fi because then the IP address for them will be the same as the next person. As the next person. And then I think what you'll find is that, you know, some of them, you know, may get filtered or whatever it is. So definitely make sure that they're off of your, your WI fi when, when they're doing that. Let's talk about so the team. Okay, so I know that we've seen different practices incentivize their team to be able to kind of like, hey, we've got a contest this month where, you know, we're going to be able to buy pizza for the, you know, the team that gets the most reviews or for everyone, whatever it may be. Like, what have you seen as far as incentivizing or any recommendations you have as far as incentivizing the team and then also incentivizing the patient itself. Thoughts?

Based on my observation, having seen many, many, many practices try to institute that incentivizing the team. And I say the team does not work. Okay. And maybe you're watching this and you're like, well, that's what we do and it works. Cool. I'm just saying, I've seen it tried dozens of times. It never works as well as you want it to, if at all, because it's just this sense of like, oh, we're all doing this. Maybe someone else will do it. Right? There's no ownership to it. Find one person who wants to do this and incentivize them. Right? Have them be the one that Goes in on post op days. We got eight post ops today. You know, Cheryl is going to be the one that goes in and she does it. And for every review they get, you know, she gets a little, she gets a little spiff or whatever. But like find the one person who's motivated to do that, give them the ownership of it and make that part of their job role. It is a night and day difference between that and trying to incentivize the team.

Yeah. I also think though that when you start getting these types of reviews that are exciting and whatnot, share that with your team, read the actual review and say, here's Patricia who had refractive lens exchange last week and here's how it's completely changed her life. We are in the changing life business and I think that being able to help people as far as your huddle, to internalize that and get that emotional sort of like connection to the patient and the review process I think is really important.

So what happens so often, and this is, this can be the result of discontent and attitudes and different things within your practice. But you've got folks that are part of the patient journey. And if you look at it like a relay, right. You look at it like a relay race. And that's how we think about it, right? You're running with a baton, you hand it to the next person, hand it to the next person. You're trying to keep momentum, you're trying to keep everything moving forward. But like take your techs, for example. They're the second leg of a four leg relay. And so often they will run their leg, they will knock it out, they're feeling good about it, they'll hand off that baton and they have no idea what happened at the finish line. They just don't know because they're on to the next person. So when you're reading those reviews, right, or you're even taking the time to go in and say, hey, I know that Mr. Jones was kind of a pain earlier, but you did such a great job with him. He was so chill when he came in and he actually booked an advanced technology lens with us. So I just wanted to let you know that we got that win for him and I really appreciate you doing that when you can give that feedback by reading reviews or giving personalized feedback. Now I'm running the second leg, but I can see what happened at the finish line. I can see that we got the gold medal and that's so motivating for those team members that are more in the, in the trenches. Kind of a spot and don't ever know what happens at the end. So thanks for bringing that up.

There's one thing that I want to touch on before I bounce it over to you to talk about scripting for how to be able to get reviews, how to. Or referrals. And that has to do with responding to reviews. And this is something that I see a lot of practices not do, which is responding to not only the quote unquote negative ones, but also the positive ones. You want to give a pat on the proverbial back for the ones that are five star and you want to be able to take offline any challenges that you've got from somebody that gives you a one, two or whatever star review you can. What I have seen, Troy, is that a lot of times, if you actually engage with that patient and find out what they're at is why they left that review, many times you can turn that one star into a five star if you handle it properly. So I don't like to get into the intricacies and the nuts and bolts of why they aren't happy or whatever it is. I like to, you know, just respect their privacy and HIPAA and move that offline. But see if you can have a very rapid response to people leaving reviews. Anything you want to add to that before we move to the next next thought.

People leave bad online reviews and I've done it. You've probably done it. People watching have probably done it. But you do it when you feel like you've exhausted all other channels to be heard, right? I left a not very kind review for a company that comes out here and does some water treatments for we're out in the country, right. And I left the review after I'd already called them three times. I couldn't get ahold of someone. I was trying to get a quote on something. They didn't. They were not responsive. So finally I'm like, if you're not going to talk to me to fix this, I'm going to go try to do something else to get it fixed. Okay. So you will get fewer negative reviews if you're being proactive on the front end and making sure, like Michael said, like, hey, if everything's great, we want to know and if it's not, we want to know that too. We want to fix it. Right? Make sure that you're actually fixing it and keeping it on the front end. Because if your patient who's upset for whatever reason, you may be the best surgeon in the world, but you're Going to have frustrated patients who have unreasonable expectations. Right. If they are frustrated, but they feel like you listened to them and you took their frustration seriously and you're doing something to fix it, that review is never going to show up online. It's never going to show up online. Now back to your question about responding to reviews. Definitely. I see this too often, man. Do not put anything that's going to identify that person as a patient in the review. And I'm not talking about, like, their diagnosis. I mean, just saying, like, you patient, like, period, you are in. You are just asking for trouble if you do that. Do not do that. And there are plenty of ways and word tracks that you can use to get around that and address the complaint. But the thing I want you to keep in mind is ultimately we want to solve that so they go back and change the review or take it down. Right. But the negative review reply is not for that person. I'm calling them. I'm trying to figure all that out. Right. The negative review reply is for everyone else that's going to see that review. Yes.

Bingo.

Everyone else that's going to see that review. You want to, you want them to see that whatever the complaint was, you want to reframe it in a way. I'll give you just a quick example on this. Somebody's complaining about wait times. Somebody's complaining about wait times. Right. Well, that sounds like a problem. I was in there and it took, you know, I thought I was going to be in there for an hour and it took two. And this is unacceptable. And they're frustrated. Okay, how would I reframe that? Well, here's how I would reframe it. Hey, you know, we certainly, we apologize sometimes we do have longer wait times, depending on what's going on in the practice. The reason for that is. Okay, the reason for that is that we make it a point to answer every single patient's question when they come in. Some people have more questions than others, but it is important to us that we are not just churning people through here and getting them out the door until. Until all their questions are answered and they are comfortable and they've got all the information they need. Unfortunately, sometimes that leads us to be a little bit behind. We do our best to not let that happen, but it does occur from time to time, and we appreciate our patients being patient with us as we ensure every single one of them is taken care of. Okay, so now it's like, man, that long wait time sucks. Well, it's because they actually take their Time to talk to all their patients and they're really not trying to run a ton of people through there. But that's actually not that big of a problem. It's actually a good thing. Right? So that's what I'm saying. When the review response is for everyone else, I want everyone else to see that and go, that's kind of frustrating. But like, that's actually probably pretty good. So keep that in mind when you're responding to any negative reviews that you get.

One thing I want to talk about, we talked a lot about reviews, is talk about referrals because I think that's actually what also practices are wanting to know what are some things that they could be able to do to be able to get more referrals. And I've seen everything from, you know, a little, you know, a card that it can give somebody that you know has. And it varies by state. So whatever your state allows you to do as far as giving discounts or incentivizing people for giving referrals, check in with that on your particular state. But I will say this, Troy, I've seen everything from people giving out little wallet sized cards. One thing that we've actually tried, not tried, we've implemented is where we send people who are alumni to a, to, to a page right now. We let them know, whether at their one day or one week mark, be like, hey, listen, you're now one of our alumni. We're going to, you are now into our, you know, XYZ procedure referral program. If there's anybody that you know or care about that would like to learn about this procedure, they can get. If you wanted to incentivize the person being referred, you can do that. Again, check with your state if you want to incentivize a person giving the referral, you can again check with your state what you're allowed to do. But my point is, is that we would send this link to people, share this link with anybody right on that page. What does it have? Has a video from the surgeon and that says, hey, somebody that you know or care about sent you this link because they think you may benefit from XYZ procedure. My name is Dr. So and so. And you know, here we do da da da da da da. We'd be honored and grateful if you would want to use this as a guide to be able to learn more about this procedure. You can click the link below to be able to schedule or request a consultation. And then on that link it has first name, last name, email, phone number, and who referred you. So then the practice then gets this link, gets this submission of Jane Doe, who was referred by John Doe, and they can be able to use that as a digital way to be able to get referrals. And you could use QR codes on cards and all that stuff. But there's a lot of different ways that you can be able to, you know, automate the process of getting referrals. But I think a lot of that also starts with the conversation in clinic, because, you know, I think that the mindset you want to have is that, look, we could spend gobs of money on marketing, and we do spend a lot on marketing, but really what we want to spend more of our time on is being exceptional in our patient experience. And if you found that this to be of really good value and you would like to be able to share it with somebody else, we just want to make it easy for you to do so. That's it. And you can give them this card, you can send them this link or whatever it is. Think about ways on how you can be able to make that process easier. And then again, on anything that you send to them, have more social proof on that page. So that landing page I talked to you about, have more testimonials, video testimonials, written testimonials to make it easy. So anything. Troy, you want to add to that before we talk about your Google business profile?

Yeah. Ask. Ask for referrals. Ask. Ask. Ask for referrals. Listen to me. This is the number one problem probably for most practices, just in terms of losing revenue. We're just not asking. Ask people for these things. Ask people for the referral. Hey, I'm so glad, Mrs. Jones, that your vision so good. Listen, you're going to have some friends who are super jealous of your new eyes, okay? When you do, tell them to call me. Here's some of my cards. Give me a shout. As long as they're as cool as you are, we'll take great care of them.

Yeah, okay.

That's the line. That's the line. Give them some cards to keep and to ask them to call me, okay? If I'm the scheduler, I'm the person who spent time with them. I got them taken care of. They're loving their vision. They have some rapport with me. All right? You've got people in your life that work for companies, and you don't even know what the company is. But, you know, if I got a sprinkler issue, if I got a plumbing issue, if I Got something going on. I'm calling this person that's in my phone. Not this business. All right, do the same thing with your team. I swear, nobody does this. Almost nobody does this. Some people doing this, fantastic. But they're so hesitant to do it. And it's such a phenomenal way to get the referral. Just call me, text me the scheduler. I will get them set up. I will take care of them. I will. You know, I'll make it all happen for them. You know, I will, because I did it for you.

Such a simple action item, but for many people, they just don't do that consistently enough, you know?

Yep.

Okay, so Google Business Profile, just to round out our conversation here, I think that this is something that actually helps to influence reviews, helps to influence referrals. And you want to think about your Google Business Profile again as an asset. It's a free asset, which is great, but many practices. What I see, Troy, is that, you know, they're not updating the photos enough. They're not getting enough reviews. They're not responding to the reviews. They, you know, if you look at in a. Because your Google Business Profile really plays into search engine optimization, we're not going to really get into SEO in this conversation, but I did want to mention that, you know, updating your photos on there and having real human to human, like actual content versus like stock photos and whatnot, you can post videos on there of those FAQs I talked about earlier. You can have a staff photo, you can have candid photos of your doctor doing whatever it may be. But I really strongly recommend to keep that relevant in the eyes of Google because then again, when people go to your Google Business Profile and they see that you've got 4.8 and 205 stars or whatever, and they see all these images of what the practice looks like, that. That can be more effective than your own website. It can be more effective than running paid ads. So your Google Business Profile, to me, and to a lesser extent, Yelp, but those are assets that you can be able to leverage to your benefit. Thoughts?

Your Google Business Profile, just real quick, is that little Google box that comes up when you Google your practice. Just so I want to make sure everyone understands what that is. When we say that if you Google your practice name on a desktop, it's going to. It's going to show you some results, but then it's also going to have a little box here and it's going to have like a picture and you can click to the map and you can see the reviews. That little Google box, which is what some people call it, is your Google business profile. The thing to remember with Google, and this goes for everything, is Google is the search engine that everyone goes to. You want to use all the Google products that you can and maximize those. Because Google sees, hey, you're using our stuff, they give you, they give you like some extra points, right? They give you some extra credit which can help with your SEO and other things. So go into the back end of your Google business profile. You get, I think it's business.google.com or something like that. Go in there, make sure you got the pictures like Michael said. Make sure your categories are filled out, make sure all your descriptions are filled out. Go in there and fill that thing up with every little area that Google has. Make sure you got something selected in there. So Google knows, hey, these people are paying attention to this. They're trying to use our system. We're going to give them a little extra credit.

And you know, there's one other, there's a real world application and benefit for this because if you are in a, in a specific market and I'll just use refractive lens exchange procedure, right? So when Jane Doe Googles refractive lens exchange near me or Lasik near me or smile near me or whatever it may be, there are specific practices that will show up for that. It's usually three that are in that map pack, if you will and if you can have a highly relevant Google business profile. And there's a bunch of other factors that go into how you rank in the top three. But if you can be able to rank in that top three, well, you know what that does is you're going to get, I don't know what the number is. I think it's roughly 30 to 40% but you know, I'd have to check on that. But there's a lot of conversions that happen from that map pack from those first three because people trust that organic part more than they trust an ad, right? And I think that that's a part that I think that, you know, if I could see, oh, there's ABC practice with 4.9 and 350 reviews versus XYZ practice and oh, 3.8 and 5 or you know, stars like there's a huge difference. Most people going to click the one that had the higher, higher reviews. And so I think you gotta be able to get more reviews and more referrals to be able to leverage that asset. Let's round out this, this video. Troy, is there any other topic or thoughts that we have not covered, my.

Friend, I think we hit it, man. Go out there and ask for your reviews, ask for your testimonials, optimize your Google business profile, and again, these are all assets that you can leverage that are essentially very low cost or free to get more patients into your practice. So take the tips that we've shared. We shared a lot of nuggets in this particular episode. Take those and implement those. And be sure to share this video with other people in your office who are involved in these different areas that we've discussed. SA.