Dental Medias Trustbuilder can be one of the most efficient tools to improve, not only your online presence, but also your practice itself.
It allows you to keep an eye on your practitioners performance and react to dissatisfied patients. At the same time it helps you nudge satisfied patients towards your preferred review platform to improve your online review ratings.
The platform works automatically on clinics with a live Dental Media integration (mainly Scandinavian clinics at the time of writing), whereas non integrated clinics will need to manually send out the Trustbuilder links or simply put the link in follow up messages sent out by your patient management system it it allows custom texts.
Whatever the case may be, there are some important guidelines and best practices, you can follow to maximise the effects of the Trustbuilder.
1. Consider how often you want the patients to get this survey.
The more often you send it out the more responses you’ll likely get, however, sending too many messages to the same patient can also annoy them. Try to find a good middleground here.
We typically suggest that a patient can get this surveey once every 3-6 months max.
That means that some patients will get the survey request every time they visit your clinic, but if they have work done that requires multiple appointments within a short period of time they are not spammed.
2. Make sure you know and understand the external survey sites' strengths and weaknesses before you choose where to send the patients.
For example:
Google is a good target as it asn easy platform to get results on. Many users are permanently logged in to their google accounts so no login is necessary for ost people. It helps boost you in the search results when you do good and you are allowed to “cherrypick”m, meaning that you can just send all the happy patients to google avoid sending dissatisfied patients. However, you will require that many more Google reviews to stand out, as they are a little easier to get.
Trustpilot is trickier, as they do not allow cherrypicking, so you will have to send all patients to Trustpilot if you choose that platform. However, Trustpilot is a popular platform for organinc reviews from dissatisfied customers, so it can easily spin out of control in a negative way if you don’t keep an eye on it. Sending patients to Trustpilot can be a way to improve a negative rating that has grown organically as you are often most likely to get more positive reviews if you send patients there directly. Another challenge is that when sending people to trustpilot, they usually need to log in to leave a review. That means fewer patients will actually take their time to do it. in other words you get more reviews per 100 patients from sending them to Google than Trustpilot.
That doesn’t mean Google is the best solution for you every time. For example if you have a bad Trustpilot score, it makes sense to improve that by sending patients there. So in short: Consider what you need right now to make the bes choice. And if you have doubts, ask us - We’re here to help :)
3. Use the survey responses internally.
It makes sense that you can use the Trustbuilder to build your online presence at external review platforms as mentioned above, but the survey responses are very useful internally.
You can use them to:
- Improve your practitioners performance
- Catch and follow up on dissatisfied patients and maybe avoid a lost patient
- Boost the mood of the employees by asking for comments in positive responses.
Using the satisfaction score to improve performance:
With every response, we calculate a satisfaction score. These scores can be seen both clinic wide and per practitioner in the Dental Media app.
This allows you to see how your practitioners are performing over time. If a practitioner is dropping in performance, you may want to look at what could be improved. This leads us to the next point:
Preventing patient churn and improving:
All negative responses are per default asked for a phone number and a comment (non mandatory questions). If a negative response comes in, you are notified by email and can read the comments and phone numbers. This allows you to follow up with the dissatisfied patient directly and find out what went wrong, how it could be better, and maybe even turn a bad experience into a good one and at the same time learn from it.
When contacting a dissatisfied patient, we recommend that it is not the pracctitioner who handled the patient who calls. It is much better to have a third party from the clinic call, as this will typically prompt a more honest response from the patient who, if contacted by the practitioner they criticised, might try to avoid a conflict by toning down their experience, thereby devaluating the information. Afterwards, use the call with the patient as the basis for a conversation with the practitioner on how a similar situation can be avoided in the future (assuming the criticism is warranted of course).
Finally you can use the information from the trustbuilder to build up a positive experience for practitioners and clinic staff alike.
It is possible (though not set as a default option), to ask for a comment when the responses are positive as well. This allows you to collect comments from happy patients. Doing this will over time build up a big pile of positive comments that can be used in marketing, as well as internally for that all important positive reinforcement.
Several of our clients have had great results using the positive comments at their weekly/monthly staff meetings, basically just reading a few of the best ones out loud to the team. Letting the staff hear comments from the happy patients can be very satisfying to the team and build up a positive energy that everyone benefits from.
4. Keep information about the survey visibly placed in the clinic waiting areas.
Remind your patients that filling out the external reviews means a lot to you by having information about this in the waiting room. This could be something as a simple sign saying "It would mean the world to us if you would, spend 5 minutes to fill out the post treatment survey we send you, and review us on Google.". When it comes to awarenes, the simple tools often brings you a lot further than you'd think.
Which brings us to the next one:
5. Talk to your patients.
I know that the idea of the trustbuilder is to automize the review proces, but the thing is: Personal connections really work!
So, if your practitioner feels like they have had a really good appointment with a client, make sure to let them know that they will receive a follow up, and that it would mean a lot to you personally, if they would take the time to do the follow up review on Google or Trustpilot.
Most people actually want to tell others about the good experiences they have and once they have promised you to do this personally, they will be much more likely to follow through and fill in the review.
That personal touch is invaluable in terms of engaging the patients.
6. Know your tech:
Make sure you know how to log in to your dental media account and where you find the Trustbuilder information.
This sounds obvious, but knowing and understanding the systems you use is essential to getting the most out of them.
The easiest way of learning how to find and read the responses and statistics in the trustbuilder is to read this guide:
If you need help understanding the numbers, please let us know. We will always be more than happy to go through the data with you and help you understand the data better.
We really hope you found this article useful. If you have any questions about this, you are welcom to contact us at support@dentalmedia.io for at chat or a walkthrough of the product. You can also call (+45) 77 34 77 35 and press 4 for the support desk.