Why Do Patients Write Online Reviews?
Hint: It’s part psychology, part economics.
One of our new customers asked us a simple but curious question:
How can we encourage more patients to leave their review on Yelp or Google?
Many so-called experts claim the best way to earn online reviews is to pressure or bribe customers into writing them. The reality is that this strategy backfires for two reasons.
First, many customers respond adversely to pressure, which can lead to negative reviews. Second, review sites — Yelp in particular — have aggressive policies against incentivizing customers into writing reviews. Some even filter out reviews they deem to be solicited. Therefore we advice against the pressure-and-bribe strategy pedaled by the pundits.
At Doctible, we don’t follow to the pundits. We empower doctors to collect patient feedback in an automated and HIPAA-compliant way. Our goal is to improve patient care at hospitals, clinics, and practices nationwide by delivering actionable insights to healthcare providers.
That said, many of our providers also hope to improve their online reputation.
These days local businesses’ ratings on review sites like Yelp, Google, and Facebook are key drivers of revenue. In the healthcare business, it’s for a good reason — it attracts patients. Research even shows that a hospital’s online ratings are highly correlated to its HCAHPS scores, which is the industry-standard measure of hospital quality.
Some hospitals have taken drastic steps to improve patient care and online reputation. For example, University of Utah Health Care implemented a policy to publicly post all patient feedback anonymously. This act of radical transparency substantially improved patient care and led to happier patients and more appointments.
Clearly there are benefits to online reviews. So how can healthcare providers encourage more patients to leave reviews online?
First, let’s look at some data to understand why patients would write reviews in the first place.
We randomly selected 10,000 Doctible patient surveys that all asked the same question: How would you rate your experience? Each patient is given an opportunity to rate their visit on a scale from 1 to 5 stars. After patients leave a rating, we allow them to provide free-form feedback. This feedback is forwarded to healthcare provider to address their concerns.
The results from our surveys are interesting. While 87 percent of patients gave a 5 star rating, only 18 percent of these patients provided feedback to their provider. On the other hand, only 1 percent of patients gave a 1 star rating but 72 percent of these unhappy patients provided feedback.
If we assume that all patients are equally motivated to provide feedback, we would observe the same feedback rate across all ratings. But this isn’t the case.
Instead, there is an inverse relationship between the rating and the feedback rate. Patients who give lower ratings are more likely to write feedback than patients who give higher ones. This suggests there are rating-specific factors that drive patients to leave feedback.
At this point any office manager would be rolling their eyes. Of course, patients who are upset are more vocal than patients who aren’t. Unhappy patients are more motivated to “right the wrongs.” Happy patients usually leave the doctor’s office and carry on with life.
Worse yet, many unhappy patients go to great lengths to express their discontent by writing negative reviews. That’s why Yelp reviews are negatively skewed compared to the survey ratings of the total patient base.
So are doctors doomed to have a heap of negative online reviews? Not quite.
Our data also shows that while the feedback rate is higher for patients reporting low ratings, there are more than enough patients that report high ratings to offset the low feedback rate.
Although only 18 percent of patients with 5 star ratings provide feedback, the chart below shows that 77 percent of all feedback comes from these happy patients. The positive feedback simply outnumbers the negative.
What’s more, collecting patient feedback leads to more online reviews. Most of our customers see a significant increase in the number of positive reviews on review sites after implementing our patient surveys.
So how can doctors encourage more patients to write reviews?
It’s part psychology, part economics.
Studies have shown that people have diverse motives for writing online reviews. Some motives are psychological (enjoying self-enhancement, venting negative feelings, helping others) and others are economic (rewarding good businesses, punishing bad ones, improving services).
While healthcare providers can’t change the underlying motives, they can encourage patients to write reviews through two key factors: patient care and customer service.
Patient surveys enable practices to improve patient care by closing the feedback loop and making patient-centric improvements. Over time, these improvements increase the number of potential positive reviews since happy patients tend to write them. Moreover, surveys signal to patients that their provider cares about customer service, which consumers reward by promoting their provider online.
So contrary to the squawk of pundits, you can’t pressure-and-bribe your way into getting more online reviews. You have to earn them. Patient surveys offer a way to do just that — by improving patient care and customer service.
