Have you ever looked at restaurant reviews online?

You can learn a heck of a lot if you do…

Last night I was browsing through Trip Advisor looking at the local restaurants and eateries in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, where our farm is located.

One restaurant that really stood out amongst others was the local Burrawang General Store and Café.

The reason it stood out to me was that every review it had received on Trip Advisor had been commented upon by the owner.

If a patron had left a great review the owner had added in a personal thank you comment to the reviewer, and thanked them for their review.

If the reviewer had left comments about expectations not being met then the owner had made comments to resolve any issues with a favourable win-win outcome being sought.

In both type of responses the owner had taken a few minutes only to engage with the reviewer.

Everybody who writes a review does so primarily to seek recognition for their comments.

To be reached out to by the owner of the restaurant in a prompt and courteous and grateful manner is certainly a way for this café owner to say:

“Hey, we’re different here.”

So many times a point of difference is all it takes to achieve substantial results.

In this case, the courteous and friendly contact from the owner provides a significant point of difference.

Why is it a point of difference?

Because not many other restaurants out there are doing things this way.

Most restaurants out there aren’t engaging with their patrons at all.

By so doing, this café owner can easily stand head and shoulders above her competition.

What are you doing with your dental office’s online presence to make it stand head and shoulders above your competitors?

In this day and age the social media tools out there are working *with* us as business owners to help us gain a more prominent online presence.

You see, now when you check in on your Facebook page that you are visiting a certain place or restaurant or business, that information about your visit is fed back to you at a later hour or later date.

And this mainly comes in the form of a request for more information from the social media site or review site.

Have you noticed this?

Have you noticed that as you are hurtling along through the airport after de-planing that your cell phone receives a message from your airline requesting information about the following question:

“How was your flight?”

And I know that it’s often the last thing you feel like doing at that moment, but some people take the time to answer these surveys right then and there….

I noticed last night that my personal Trip Advisor had a list of ten venues on it that I had visited but was still yet to review.

And that list serves as a memory jogger for me until I finally get around to leaving a review for those places.

How can we use this in our dental practice?

Nearly everybody out there is carrying a smartphone.

So why not ask your patients to check in on Facebook when they visit your Dental office?

Straight away your patient is now at this point running an advertisement for you on their social media, because they’re letting their 350-1500 friends on Facebook know that at this point in time they are visiting your dental office.

And some of those friends of your patient will click onto the link to *your* Facebook page to see what sort of a dentist their friend likes to go and see.

Secondly, your patient will receive a prompt from Facebook to leave a review of your business/Dental Office experience on your business’s Facebook page.

By making sure that your team and your office are on the ball giving great service to all of your customers, you leave your customers feeling that it is their duty to share their positive experience about your great customer service.

And that’s what they will do.

It is important to let your customers know that this sequence of events is what is going to happen, and to have a designated person in your Dental Office available to help with these patients and their Social media needs if required.

The thing is that online reviews are one of the important things that new patients are looking to find when they seek out a new dentist.

New patients are looking for good solid Social Proof to support or to validate their choice of business, be it a dental office or be it a café.

And because of restaurant review sites, and because of travel review sites and because of book review sites, and all the other review sites out there, the public are conditioned to be looking out for “what others are saying”.

So it’s important to be helping your happy customers find independent places to spread the word.

One dentist I know in Queensland was seeing a significant number of new patients who were finding and reading the Google reviews about her practice online. [Google reviews are an independent review site].

This dentist had over thirty Five-Star-Reviews while her nearest competition had something like four or five reviews.

When a new patient starts reading these reviews, there’s a great chance that they’ll be more likely to choose the dentist with the significantly larger number of reviews.

This is social proof in action again.

Throughout my travels I see location after location after location where Social Media and Review sites are not being utilised.

And who misses out here?

The patient misses out.

Because the patient doesn’t get led to the best possible dentist.

It is important that your satisfied patients know how to leave reviews of their great experiences at your Dental office on independent sites.

*****

Have you read my book , How To Build The Dental Practice of Your Dreams [Without Killing Yourself!] In Less Than Sixty Days.

You can order your copy here: Click Link To Order

*****

The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.

Email me at david@theupe.com

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