Compleet Feet work so very hard to deliver a high professional standard, but maintain an approachable friendly service. It is so important as a team to get happy feet back through the door. Gone are the days when patient satisfaction or dissatisfaction was relayed just by word of mouth. People now have access to the internet to either praise or besmirch you. Social media is a double edge sword. Whilst it gives you the platform to reach out and promote your business to a wider audience it can also be inadvertently damaging.
In terms of effort required to market and promote your business social media has in effect added another layer of finding extra time and creative energy to do it. Compleet dedicates the best part of a working day a week to promotional activities whether it is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YELL, Google Business and tweaking websites ( 3 of them). There is then the Newsletter and Blogs. It is the blogs which help Google to organically raise your internet profile and to showcase to the public you know your stuff, publish actual clinical cases and anecdotal experiences. If you ever attend a small business Internet Social Media seminar you will always have it expressed to you the importance of such activities.
On top of all of that as it wasn’t enough, if you decide to take out additional promotional marketing you have to invest time into making it pay. Despite what the likes of Yell say; “We can do it all for you!” you still have your business profile to keep up to date, fresh and relevant, plus you are advised quite strongly to keep requesting positive customer reviews. That is so much harder in practice. It always feels a bit cheeky giving out a Yell card and asking a patient if they wouldn’t mind doing a review for you. With Yell’s Reputation Manager App you can directly request a review from your mobile to your patient by texting. This still feels kind of desperate and intrusive. People say they are happy to do a review, but once out of clinic life goes on and they forget or can’t be bothered and you feel a right plum.
The best reviews are the ones which expectantly come from nowhere with no prompting. They are such a tonic and really boost morale, but then the nasty 1 star ones hit you for 6! All your hard work seems to go out the window and your well earned star ranking comes miserably down. This is not what you want the public doing searches on the internet to find. Virtually all of posted negative reviews for businesses are inappropriate. Can be misleading and skewed with so many inaccuracies to be libellous. We all know there are 2 sides to every story. A bad review can be constructive if it is fair to make you reflect on your business and improve on your services, but deconstructive if it is not.
Bad posts are normally submitted by individuals who just want to strike out with little concept of the damage they inflict on a hard working business. Compleet recently had an unwarranted review from a patient who had not attended clinic for 4 years and blamed us for her fungal toenail which she originally presented with. She remarked we did not sterilise our equipment and for people not to attend. You then get the disgruntled patients who post vindictive comments for genuine clerical errors which you have already sincerely apologise for, only to find out that they have previously let you down multiple times by missing appointments or cancelling at last minute. Feels very unjust, and one-sided.
What can you do? You have the right as a business to reply online and seek to have the slanderous unwarranted reviews removed. Both Yell and Goggle will do this, but the impact of these nasty smears, are a distraction to all the good work you do and undermine the morale of the team, but complacency should not creep into the workplace. Negative comments should make you reflect on your business practices to improve your services. That really is your best safe guard, but if they are derisory and inaccurate there are no safe guards against the antagonistic individual complaining remotely. If you decide not to have any internet presence to stop unwanted intrusive behaviour you could find your business suffer from lack of promotional activity. A real modern dilemma faced by many.
