Today, the need for managing and maintaining a good brand reputation has become mandatory for all industry professionals. Therefore, the role of online reputation management, aka ORM, is something that most industries have recently become aware of.
A prominent example of one such industry is Healthcare.
Over the last two years, the healthcare industry has been trying to adopt different ways to attract and acquire more customers and build trust and positive experiences online.
According to Grey Matters, about 93% of patients say that online reviews were either very useful or somewhat helpful in choosing a provider.
The task of maintaining valuable patients and building an element of trust is not easy for health professionals. In the absence of a communication platform, they often fail to interact with patients regularly, leading to customer loss and dissatisfaction, spoiling the reputation.
Now, let’s dive deeper into the problems faced by healthcare professionals that prevent them from maintaining their brand reputation.
Biggest challenges healthcare professionals face in managing online reputation
Unfortunately, for healthcare professionals, the process of attracting more customers and maintaining a healthy relationship, in the long run, is not easy as we say it. Let’s take a look at the challenges faced by the healthcare industry.
1. Communication gap
The healthcare industry often fails to manually contact their end customers on different channels one by one. Not remaining up-to-date with the patients’ requirements and finding solutions to fulfil the needs can lead to customer dissatisfaction.
Not knowing about the patients’ health status and not focusing on providing exceptional care and services eventually avoids room for improvement and healthcare service development. A few studies have shown that the clinician’s ability to explain, listen, and empathize can significantly affect patients’ biological and functional health outcomes.
Therefore, effective communication between healthcare professionals and patients can improve customer experience and satisfaction. Unfortunately, the unavailability of time and the absence of a communication tool can make the healthcare organization stay away from knowing patients’ health requirements and prevents them from attaining valuable prospects and a good healthcare reputation.
2. Unable to discover the grey areas
“The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.”
– Helmut Schmidt
Due to time constraints, the healthcare industry often fails to meet the patients’ needs and areas of improvement. For example, if a particular service like beds’ availability is not met, the customer would negatively review the service. These wrong opinions or negative reviews prevent future customers from entering the particular healthcare unit and, at the same time, prevent the health professionals from gaining new customers.
The absence of a tool to address the patients’ needs and requirements acts as a barrier for healthcare officials to increase customer satisfaction. Hence, failing to identify the improvement areas and not taking necessary measures to fill the void can prevent the healthcare industry from developing and building a positive impression among the customers.
3. Unaware of public opinions
Another case is where some of the multi-chained healthcare organizations are primarily unaware of its overview and overall sentiment across the globe and channels.
The health professionals may not know its best franchise, people’s ratings, and what the customers think and talk about the provider. This can prevent them from giving special attention and focusing on improving and transforming each branch to its best.
Without an ORM tool, the health professionals would remain unaware of their health service’s negative statements and prevent them from taking immediate actions to resolve them. This would lead to the worst situations where it can even become a public opinion and preclude customers from entering your healthcare unit.
Hence, staying away from knowing whether you have a positive sentiment of your business among people or not might prevent you from building an excellent online reputation.
So, the real question is, can an ORM solution help to overcome the challenges faced by the healthcare industry?
Let’s find out.
How to outsmart healthcare challenges with ORM?
Studies show that about 60% of adults depend on online reputation or ratings to choose healthcare providers. So, having a good presence on the internet can uplift your reputation and maintain a healthy customer relationship throughout the healthcare journey.
Let’s explore how the presence of an ORM solution can improve the healthcare industry’s reputation.
1. Sentiment analysis
The processes like multi-location, channel-based analysis, and social media monitoring becomes easy and smooth with an ORM solution. Through this, healthcare professionals can know the customer reviews, overall sentiment, identify the grey areas of improvement, address the customer issues, and respond to patient grievances.
ORM solution also helps to identify and manage the healthcare reputation with AI and ML-enabled sentiment analysis. It becomes easy for healthcare professionals to know and address their customers’ issues, thereby taking immediate steps.
Through personalized survey forms, ORM helps identify the patients’ experience and areas of medical improvement to help healthcare professionals in the future. These survey forms provided at the time of discharge can also prevent the customers from giving a negative online review about any failed medical services and can save medical reputation.
2. Be in constant touch
ORM helps the healthcare industry stay connected with the patients through an automated response system that records the patients’ needs and resolves them. By responding with empathy, you can make your customers feel their needs are acknowledged and you are there to help them. This builds an element of trust and maintains a healthy customer relationship.
Therefore, by having effective communication through ORM, the healthcare professionals can empower their patients and families to open up their medical needs and undergo treatment under the same unit.
3. Gain new customers
Since constant connection with customers improves customer satisfaction, the chances of gaining new customers are also high. Let’s find out how.
In addition to the experience survey, ORM can also help send referral requests to attain new patients. Once an existing customer is asked to send feedback on the medical service, you can also include a separate column to refer to someone suffering the same health issue.
Referral option in ORM solution thus enables the existing customers to refer their family members or colleagues to the same healthcare unit.
The healthcare professionals can contact the new customers, inquire about their health issues, and decide to take treatment under the same unit. This way, ORM enables the healthcare industry to gain new customers, improve customer service, and increase reputation.
Build your reputation with the perfect ORM solution
BuzzSense, our ORM solution, helps you build your online reputation by monitoring any nook and corner of the internet to instantly take control of what’s being said about your healthcare service.
Our solution performs detailed sentiment analysis on your services and provides actionable insights. We understand your customer needs and help you take the required steps to fulfill them. Our customer experience survey allows you to know how well your customers are satisfied and gain new customers through referrals.
We also offer a 24/7 response management support system- email, phone, and text as support as a service. Hence, the patients’ grievances are categorized on priority and resolved through automated smart responses. Therefore, our solution helps you stay connected with the customers throughout their healthcare journey.
Why wait? Request a demo here and explore more about BuzzSense.
