Steal our Cheat Sheet for Getting Lots of Patient Reviews

Andrea Watkins (00:00:04):
Well, hi there. I am Andrea Watkins, and if you're listening to this while juggling three patient calls, checking in a couple patients, taking a payment, selling skincare, and trying to catch your doctor in between procedures, you might be working in an aesthetic practice.

Blake Lucas (00:00:18):
And I'm Blake Lucas and this is Practiceland. This is not your doctor's podcast.

Andrea Watkins (00:00:26):
Welcome back to Practiceland, not your doctor's podcast where we get it because we've been there. So this is where we share insider tips. We really give you straight talk to help you tame the chaos, get shit done, and really gain the recognition that we all deserve working in an aesthetics practice. So today I am so excited about this topic. I can't tell you how many times I've had clients ask me about this, just in the past, probably three to four weeks. So we are going to talk about reviews and we have our resident expert, Eva here. She has spent literally years of her life specifically looking, no?

Eva Sheie (00:01:09):
Yes,

Andrea Watkins (00:01:09):
Yes, I have shaking your head.

Eva Sheie (00:01:11):
It's true.

Andrea Watkins (00:01:12):
Shaking your head that, oh gosh, I actually did that.

Eva Sheie (00:01:14):
That was a shake, a head shake of horror is what that was.

Andrea Watkins (00:01:19):
That's amazing. So Eva has what, probably about seven years specifically devoted to reviews and the aesthetic space, why they're important, how to get them, what type of strategy to use. And so I am so excited that you're here to talk with us today to share with our listeners how we should really go about getting reviews so that we can get that awareness and exposure for our practice and really why they're so important. Welcome Eva.

Eva Sheie (00:01:52):
Watkins. One time you told me that your boss called you Watkins, and now when I imagine myself talking to you, when I'm at home thinking about stuff, I always call you Watkins. Is that okay?

Andrea Watkins (00:02:02):
Everyone in my professional life, even now currently my CEO at Studio 3 Marketing literally sent me a slack yesterday morning and he is like, Hey Watkins, you got time to talk? Yeah, it kind of sticks, so it's okay. You can call me Watkins.

Eva Sheie (00:02:20):
It feels right.

Andrea Watkins (00:02:22):
I like it. I'm here for it.

Eva Sheie (00:02:24):
Before I tell you about seven years of my life working on this problem, I want to ask you, when you're in the practice, how did you do it? What was your process?

Andrea Watkins (00:02:36):
Great question. We tried so many different things and it's going to be multifaceted no matter what. The thing that we landed on that I really can't stress enough is the importance of the doctor's participation in the ask. So what we found worked the best as much as we wanted to try and push it off to our front desk or maybe our nurses during postoperative appointments. The thing that made the biggest impact is when the doctor brought it up during a postoperative appointment. So let's just put ourself in this setting. Patient is coming in three months post-op, maybe a month post-op depending on what the procedure or treatment was, and they're so thankful patient is sitting there saying, doctor, thank you so much. You have changed my life. I can walk confidently through the room without my clothes on. I can look in the mirror, I can take a selfie, I can have my friends post a picture on Instagram without me having to face tune it or whatever we're doing.

(00:03:41):
But that doctor is the person. They're the ones with the hands that change that person's life. And so what we developed in our practice that I also coach my coaching clients on is first come up with the doctor and the doctor has to be willing to bring it up during that conversation where the patient is so grateful and just say, well, thank you for letting us be a part of your journey. We're honored that you chose us and that we were able to make such an impact. If you don't mind paying it forward to other patients that are looking for a provider, I can have the girls send you over some links to our reviews. We would really appreciate just if you could share your experience with other patients that are looking to go through a similar transformative journey that you've been through. And that way you're not making it about the practice, you're not making it about the review, you're not making about the doctor, you're making about the other patients that are looking for an experience, an outcome that your patient who's sitting here before you is so happy that they've been through.

(00:04:48):
So we did that. It takes some, you always need to remind and poke and remind and poke, but when you have happy patients, you really need to capitalize on that opportunity to show gratitude first of all that they chose you, and then to just request that they share their experience with other patients looking for a provider. So after that, then we would have QR codes in our office kind of at checkout. We also had on our appointment reminder cards, we had a QR code straight to our Google reviews so that if we were writing out an appointment, we would also just say, Hey, here's here's the QR code to our Google reviews. We would love it if you would pay it forward and share your experience with other patients. Again, it was always pay it forward, share your experience with other patients, not, Hey, will you leave me a review? Hey, nothing like that. So those things. And then also automated text messages and things like that, which I'm sure we'll get into in this episode of the pod. But again, at first thing it has to be a group effort and when it starts with the doc, it really does have a much higher return and our patients are much more willing to take that extra stop.

Eva Sheie (00:06:03):
Yeah, you said it really well. If you only make it this far into this episode, you've got most of it down.

Andrea Watkins (00:06:11):
We got you the cheat codes.

Eva Sheie (00:06:11):
You've got the answer in the first six minutes. We are done.

Andrea Watkins (00:06:15):
Done, checking out. So tell me a little bit about, I was shocked when you shared with me that you had so much time and experience. I mean this expertise you have in this very niche little area. Tell me about that. What was the purpose for this and why and how did you go about this seven years of your short, beautiful life?

Eva Sheie (00:06:37):
Well, thank you. It was the most rewarding. The first five years of this process was the most rewarding work that I ever did because it was actually a survey platform that I was building. And so along with getting all that feedback, I got some really core understanding of what people will and won't do when they will do it, how the numbers play out at scale in the most successful way and that the survey results, we were converting two reviews at the end. So if you know me at all, I'm always referred to by people as scrappy and more recently, there's another word that I've been using because really what I do is try to make the most of every single effort that goes into marketing in a practice and then use it across as many places as I can because everybody is overwhelmed, too busy trying to have an impact and all of those things have to be wrapped into a system and that includes reviews. If you don't have a system or you don't have a process, then you might remember for a little while that you're supposed to ask for reviews, but then you're going to forget and life's going to go on and then months will go by and you don't have any. And then the doctor's going to come by and go, why aren't we getting reviews? I thought you guys were asking for reviews. And then you all get in trouble and then you start asking again, and then a couple of weeks later you start forgetting, Here we are.

Andrea Watkins (00:08:09):
Well, I don't think it's even forgetting you get a new priority now we need to do this and now we need to do this. So it easily gets put on that back burner when we're then focusing on something new or some bright, shiny new thing that we need to run down the aisle and take care of.

Eva Sheie (00:08:24):
So these days, if you see a practice online that you don't know them at all and they have hundreds or thousands of reviews, what do you think when you see that?

Andrea Watkins (00:08:35):
When I see that?

Eva Sheie (00:08:36):
Yeah.

Andrea Watkins (00:08:37):
Well, I think, wow, they really have great relationships with their patients because their patients are willing to take the time to actually express and outline what their experience was. Also, I think they must have a really great process in place or they must get incentivized. Their team gets incentivized and gets gift cards or something like that. Maybe they do fun games on a monthly or quarterly basis in order to keep it top of mind for everybody on the team.

Eva Sheie (00:09:09):
When you ask, and this is really the key, like yes, the doctor is asking, but I think everybody's asking and there's a moment that they're trained to know this is when I ask if you know that about 80% of people will say yes and actually do it, then it doesn't feel so bad you're going to get some nos. That's okay. Or you're going to get some people who say yes and then they won't do it anyway because they're being nice. But that when you build a system of asking for them and incentivize the asking, not the getting, then you're all going to end up in the right place. So think's a key thing that I'm adding on to what you're saying is everybody's asking the incentivization, is that a word?

Andrea Watkins (00:09:58):
Webster dictionary chat, GPT, can you help?

Eva Sheie (00:10:01):
If you're that administrator or the marketing manager or the practice owner or whoever is in charge of building the system and putting it in place, you're incentivizing your team to ask not to get because you can't control what that patient's going to do and we certainly don't want to be bothering the patient, and so if you just want to incentivize the right thing.

Andrea Watkins (00:10:22):
Yeah, so how do you do that? Explain to me, I love this, and what's your strategy for incentivizing the ask and how do you track the ask?

Eva Sheie (00:10:31):
Very good question. You just really make a leaderboard and put it in the back room and capture how many times people are asking. If you're asking, you're going to get them because we know that 80% of people are going to say yes, everyone is asking when it feels organic, but there are certain people who are built into the process of asking whose job it is and they're the ones who we're tracking. In the best case scenario, you're not asking when people are running out the door. So for most appointments, let's focus on surgery for a second. Everyone who has surgery has something like a six to eight week post-op appointment. Everyone who comes in for that appointment is going to have a theoretically, not a huge amount of downtime, but a moment where it's okay to say, have you written a review for us yet? And if they say No, I haven't to point them somewhere on their own phone and get them to do it right then and there.

Andrea Watkins (00:11:38):
Yeah, we used to have the little stands or a picture frame with a cute little thing and then the QR code there so that while they're in the room waiting for the doctor or the nurse to come in and do their postoperative appointment, that if someone had already done the ask, then they could just take a picture of the QR code and do it right there while they were waiting for the doctor to come in or depending on how that appointment went.

Eva Sheie (00:12:04):
Right. Yeah, that makes complete and total sense. And it's probably similar in most practices, especially in plastic surgery, that people do things this way and that what's most important is it's the six to eight week post-op appointment and the timing is what matters here is that's when you're making that ask. It's not at the one day or the one week when they're still feeling like dying and on the rollercoaster probably in the valley of the rollercoaster to be completely honest.

Andrea Watkins (00:12:39):
And then if they don't do it at that 4, 6, 8 week appointment, you're still going to have a three month or a six month maybe even that year. We would like to get them sooner than that of course, but the earlier, we don't want to do it right after surgery. But if we wait until the sixth month and then they don't do it and they don't come back at a year, then we've lost our opportunity for the personal request as opposed to we can know who's done it and who's not. It is a good idea too, just to kind of track that in the patient's chart if they've left a review so that we don't ask them again.

Eva Sheie (00:13:16):
One thing that you're giving me a memory of here, which is pretty important is let's say you have not done a good job having a system or asking and you're way, way behind and you know it, okay, you have to do something to catch up. What I learned from surveying is that you can send someone a survey up to two years after they've had surgery and they will respond and they will give you honest feedback. And so it would be pretty strange, I think just as a bit of a word messaging junkie to send a review request to someone who had surgery two years ago. But what we found was that if you framed it as a survey and you wrote the right email with that survey, that you could actually get them to give honest feedback about their experience and write a review that long after. Wow. So there are ways to get caught up, which I think is important here. It just has to do with, again, the way that you ask.

Andrea Watkins (00:14:16):
Yeah. What would you suggest is a good way to ask for those longer term patients that had their surgery done a while ago?

Eva Sheie (00:14:24):
I think I would go back to what you were saying earlier and frame it about helping other people still, your experience was important to us and we value your opinion, something like that. We're reaching out to patients to see really how can we help improve our processes so we can help future patients. So it's always about helping others, whatever the request is, I think that's the right direction to go. It's been a while since I've actually written that request. So the exact words are not right in the front of my brain at this moment, but the feeling and the goal, the ways, the tricks and the stuff that I used to get around those kinds of things, that stuff all still works. And I think that's the important takeaway is that a request to be a human and help other humans is never going to be stale even if years have gone by and it may actually reactivate a patient and get them to come back in for something else. Because what you're really saying when you send a survey is we care about what you think.

Andrea Watkins (00:15:35):
Absolutely. I love that. So when do people read reviews?

Eva Sheie (00:15:43):
When do you think they read 'em?

Andrea Watkins (00:15:46):
I think primarily, I've definitely seen one statistic and I've used it previously that 70% of patients actually look at reviews and make determinations on their doctors based on 'em. It's probably higher now. I think that that data is probably a little outdated, but definitely before they even call, because we know that when people are looking, it's not before they actually choose you. Of course, that's another time they can look, but the first time that they look is when they're looking online to figure out who they even want to pick up the phone and call. I would assume.

Eva Sheie (00:16:26):
They definitely do. And so I think what's important about the when is they read them. We all know they read them before they call. They also read them after because they want to confirm that they made a good decision and then they have different eyes, so they may go back through and look for different things after because now they know somebody, they spoke to somebody, they heard you say things and they want to go validate what they heard. There's a before, there's a during because they're about to come in for a consult or an appointment, and then after that they go back and read them again. So they serve a different purpose at every stage throughout that patient journey. And if you don't have enough, then they end up losing confidence. So that's important too. We're going to get to quantity and why quantity is so important because actually built us a dos and don'ts list that we're going to get to here in a minute.

Andrea Watkins (00:17:21):
Oh good.

Eva Sheie (00:17:22):
Oh yeah, I know. Super fun.

Andrea Watkins (00:17:26):
That's great. And one other thing that has come up just within the past six months or so that's been really a hot topic is the reviews that we're getting online. Not just Google, but Yelp and Health Grades and RealSelf and all these places where we're showing up digitally as a doctor surgeon in the space or as a practice. A lot of people are now using chat GPT for basically search, and for several of my clients, they've had a lot of people who have self-reported. Where'd you find out or where'd you hear about us? Yeah. Oh, I chat GT chat. GPT gave me your information chat, GPT, which has been really shocking, but I've seen it happen with lots of clients. And so the formula that chat GBT is really using now is how would a friend answer this? It's not just based on Google rankings and how Google is rating your website. It's taking all the information that I'm able to gather that's out there in the interwebs and then putting it together and then serving up answers and reviews are definitely very important to that because even in the chat search results that they're giving, they're even saying in little print after the website that it might give you little print patients say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Reviews say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this is becoming more and more critical in these different areas where patients are finding our practices.

Eva Sheie (00:19:00):
It's a little bit like the beginning of SEO and it's extremely frustrating to me because if I know something is factually true in the real world and then I ask my AI a question and it gives me things that are factually untrue. For instance, it recently told me that a doctor I know worked in a practice that she has never worked in. It said her name and it said she worked in this other practice where she's never ever worked.

(00:19:28):
And her name isn't anywhere on that website. It's not associated anywhere in the world. And so I actually find myself fighting back with my AI tool, and so this is another thing I want to call out is chat GBT is becoming like Kleenex and everybody's saying they use chat GPT. I was talking to a doctor this morning who said, I asked chat GPT this question and it kept giving me the wrong answer. I'm like, I don't really think that everyone is using chat GPT, and I didn't trust it from the get go. And so I looked myself for a better tool and the one I use combines five models into one and uses all of them to combine the results and give me what I think are slightly better, but still not great. I fight with it, I'll respond and say, why didn't you include this person in these results who is a factually known expert in this thing? And it will say, oh, I'm so sorry. You're totally right.

Andrea Watkins (00:20:30):
My husband does, my husband does the exact same thing with it, just has these conversations where he's like, Chat gpt is lying to me again. And I agree with you, it's it's not always accurate. It's not always what we assume or want it to be. However, we still need to be present and relevant in the places where our patients are using the platforms. So whether the patients know it's accurate or not, we don't have control over that. What we do have control over is the information we're putting out there into the universe that may get picked up because people are using this tool.

Eva Sheie (00:21:06):
That's exactly right. And so the answer isn't to go figure out how to game the chat GPT results, it's to keep doing the right thing every day, which is ask your patients to write reviews. And I think the nuance that is a little bit newer that I may, I don't remember if I've ever said it in the past, but I'm saying it now, is when you are asking that patient to write a review, it's about their experience with the treatment, the procedure, the results. Because what you need included in their review is those keywords about their procedure so that on the backend when someone asks their AI tool for the best surgeon for breast surgery revision, if that's in your reviews, if those words are in your reviews, I went to this doctor for my revision surgery because my breasts were lopsided, then you're connecting the dots between the search and the result.

Andrea Watkins (00:22:07):
I love that. That's like the hot tip of the day everyone, when patients ask, what should I write? Include the procedure or treatment, the experience, the outcome, but make sure that that procedure treatment is in there so that anything can pick it up. I love that. Great tip. That's incredible.

Eva Sheie (00:22:26):
And so combining that ask, you're welcome. Combining your ask with your tools that you're using to help people remember to write the review in some of the tools, you can actually customize the way you ask, and certainly if you're using email, you can write that right in your email request. Thank you for agreeing to write a review. Don't forget to include 1, 2, 3, because anytime you give us instructions, the task becomes easier. Oh, they want me to write about my results. Oh, they want me to write about my experience. And that just as a jaded old person, if you have providers who come and go, especially a non-surgical, if the reviews are about their treatment instead of the provider, that's actually a really big, I'm not going to call it a problem, but in nonsurgical, it's way easier to write about the provider than it is to write about the Botox. Then you're helping yourself down the road too. If you have an injector who moves on someday, then the reviews aren't irrelevant anymore. They're still relevant because they had a great experience.

Andrea Watkins (00:23:38):
That's a really good point as well. Any attrition and turnover, it helps protect the practice as the experience and the treatment and the outcome, not just the people. I love that. So seven years, tell us all about it.

Eva Sheie (00:23:53):
So five years of serving, then I went back to RealSelf. So around 2016 I went to work at RealSelf, and after a little while what we decided that I would work on was the problem of people needing more reviews. And in that situation, RealSelf profiles that had more reviews perform better. So in a really big company, you can put one person on one problem and let them work on it for a really long time, and that was the one that our wonderful leader gave to me was,

Andrea Watkins (00:24:27):
You drew the short straw, poor thing. No, I'm kidding.

Eva Sheie (00:24:30):
Actually, they knew that I liked to solve big problems. So I got unleashed on this one and I was sent out into actual practices with a training to test to see if I could move the needle on training people to get more reviews and would it actually work. And so the headline is yes, it worked, but it wasn't until I was quite a few visits in field visits and until I had the big light bulb, and let me tell you what it was, it was wild and I never ever would've come across it had I not been physically in the office.

(00:25:10):
And so I was sitting in somebody's lobby and this girl was coming for her appointment and she was standing outside the front door on her phone and she was writing something on her phone. She was out there for 10 or 15 minutes, and I do, I was like, what is she doing out there? Why isn't she just coming in? And whoever was working in the office said, oh, well, we incentivize them to write Yelp reviews, but if they write them while they're in the office, Yelp deletes the reviews, but if they write them outside the office, they stick. And so this was, I can't believe it was almost, it was probably seven or eight years ago. What's important about this is the patient was writing on her own phone, and that was why the review stuck. But also think about a lot of people at this time were trying to get people to write a review on a kiosk and they would set up a computer in the lobby and they would be like, can you go write a review? Well, what does it feel like when you're on someone else's phone or someone else's computer?

(00:26:13):
It's not yours. It feels awkward.

Andrea Watkins (00:26:16):
It's awkward.

Eva Sheie (00:26:17):
So there's barrier number one, this is friction. You're not going to get a great review from someone if you're basically shining a big spotlight on them in the lobby. And then it

Andrea Watkins (00:26:29):
Makes me think of those little desks with the computers. Yes, I'm aging myself and I'm old, but when you would go to the library so that you could, and they would have the little walls up around it, and the monitor was two feet deep because we're talking the eighties and nineties and you're just sitting there type chicken peck in the middle of a room

Eva Sheie (00:26:48):
Trying to find this book in the card catalog and I can't find it. Where's the microfiche? Now everyone knows I'm 50 woo

Andrea Watkins (00:26:55):
Dewey decimal, let's go.

Eva Sheie (00:26:59):
So all of this, these little friction points keep you from doing the thing that we want you to do. So I was out there trying to remove all these little friction points, so that was light bulb. Number one was they need to be on their own phone. Huge. If you need someone to do something for you, make it comfortable for them. That's still true today and easy. You want them on their own phone and then you don't have any of those validation issues either. It used to be a really big deal where the person was physically located, and even if they were writing it on their phone in the office, that wouldn't trigger the system that it was a fake review because they were on their cell instead of on the office wifi, things that would get it removed.

(00:27:43):
Then the other big moment that I had was I was at a conference and they pulled a bunch of people into a room to talk about how they were getting reviews. There were several people there who were getting hundreds at the time. They were clearly outliers and very successful, and the platform they were using wasn't great, but the mechanism was that they were doing it in the office and not when someone was running out the door. So I mentioned this briefly earlier, was that they had figured out the exact moment where they were most likely to say yes while they were in the office, and they had a moment of downtime that was long enough to write a review while they were there. The other thing I love about 2025 is that we don't have to deal with which platform should I write on anymore, because Google really became the dominant platform for reviews a couple years ago, despite my best effort to make it.

Andrea Watkins (00:28:43):
Yeah, well, that algorithm had killed you 2018.

Eva Sheie (00:28:48):
It was me versus Google, and I pretty sure I didn't have a chance,

Andrea Watkins (00:28:53):
But I really did try.

Eva Sheie (00:28:55):
No, nobody does.

Andrea Watkins (00:28:56):
Nobody has a chance. What's also interesting about the reviews and the different platforms is I have one client in the Bay Area that gets a ridiculous amount of people from Yelp

Eva Sheie (00:29:11):
That is unique to San Francisco.

Andrea Watkins (00:29:13):
It's very unique to the Bay Area, and I mean, I have clients from Honolulu to Boston and New York City and everywhere in between. This is just this very tiny segment where we actually, we do focus on Google and Yelp because of that very unique subgroup of human beings that everybody uses Yelp, which I find very, very interesting. So if you're in the Bay Area, know that Yelp is really just as important as far as I'm concerned, as Google.

Eva Sheie (00:29:45):
It's also really important for nonsurgical because med spas do really well on Yelp and plastic surgery practices. So I think when you're talking about nonsurgical, then you may consider identifying people who already use Yelp somehow, either when you're asking, you could just simply say, where do you like to write reviews? And if they say, oh, I love Yelp, you can also look people up pretty easily, and I don't want to introduce any crazy variation to the system. Most important is that you're asking everybody and you're making it easy for them to do, and then the Yelp ones, they'll just automatically happen because Yelps will go to Yelp, Yelp first, they will just do that. So as these systems have really matured over time, it has gotten so much easier and I'm so grateful because I mean, I kind of sometimes wish I had worked on something else for all those years, but it's okay.

Andrea Watkins (00:30:45):
Yeah. Well, let's go through our do's and don'ts because you have put together a genius little bullet point list for us to go through here. So why don't you share some of your do's for,

Eva Sheie (00:30:58):
Can we start with don't?

Andrea Watkins (00:31:00):
Okay.

Eva Sheie (00:31:00):
They're more fun is more fun.

Andrea Watkins (00:31:02):
Let's start with the absolute, don't do these things, or you're going to crash and burn.

Eva Sheie (00:31:06):
Do the don'ts have funnier stories that go with the

Andrea Watkins (00:31:08):
Okay, perfect. The don't. So you want to go ahead and start with your list?

Eva Sheie (00:31:13):
Yeah, yep. Don't try to game it and don't write fake reviews for yourself. It's not worth it. People can tell first of all. So the funny story that goes with that is there was a doctor once who we used to catch everyone who wrote a fake review. We had really secret ways, but we had ways with technology of figuring out where they were coming from and if they were coming from one person, and this doctor had his mom write five fake reviews for him and they all got taken down and then he got mad at us for taking them down. He was like, they're all real. My mom had all those procedures and we were like, dude, don't

Andrea Watkins (00:31:51):
Under different names and different accounts. I mean, that takes some effort to do fake reviews really, because you have to have individual logins to be able to write different reviews.

Eva Sheie (00:32:02):
It's a lot of work. You're right. Don't do it. Just ask your time is better spent talking to actual patients.

Andrea Watkins (00:32:08):
Yes, ask real people.

Eva Sheie (00:32:09):
If you don't have any happy patients, you have bigger problems,

Andrea Watkins (00:32:12):
Serve them well, provide a great experience and a great outcome, and the ask will be a lot less complicated than having to go and create all these fake accounts. Yep. Great. Okay. What else do you have for us, Eva?

Eva Sheie (00:32:25):
Do not cherry pick. There's a lot of people who still think, oh, I'm going to put this system in place where we filter out anyone who's unhappy ahead of time and we're going to only ask the happy patients for reviews. And really you're shooting yourself in the foot because asking everyone is the best way to get the most reviews, and quantity is much more important than anything else. So if you have hundreds or thousands, there's many practices now who have thousands because they've had good habits since the beginning. Having thousands of fives, hundreds of fours, and a handful of ones builds trust and credibility and that is what you want.

Andrea Watkins (00:33:07):
Okay, very good. That's good advice. And what else?

Eva Sheie (00:33:11):
The last one I think was obvious from my earlier story was like, don't try to set up a kiosk. Don't try to come up with a fancy system. Just use what people already are comfortable with and you'll be very successful. Don't bribe people to write reviews.

Andrea Watkins (00:33:26):
Oh, I was just going to say that and fact checked me, but I do believe that our compliance attorney had shared with me that it's actually against the FTC regulations to incentivize individual users to leave reviews. And so also depending on who that message is hitting on, you're really kind of leaving a bad taste in people's mouth. My husband, just a real short story, so my husband and son went to a consultation, this is several years ago for my son to get braces and they're sitting in the lobby and there was a little kiosk board there that said, leave us a five star review, get a $10 gift card to Starbucks. And my husband was like, WTF, so you're bribing people to leave you a five star specifically. Then he went on the reviews and he saw that they had all these five star reviews and he is like, I don't believe any of these because I'm sitting here in your lobby and you just bribed people 10 bucks for them. We didn't go to that. We specifically did not go to that orthodontist outfit because he's like, these people are jackals. Yeah, jackals, yeah, whatever. I was trying to think of not a swear word to say, and that just came out total backfire.

Eva Sheie (00:34:49):
What if you came in because you read all the reviews and then you saw that you'd be like, I'm out. Bye.

Andrea Watkins (00:34:54):
Yeah, turn about face. I'm out of here. These people are shady as shit. So

Eva Sheie (00:35:00):
Yes, not a good idea.

Andrea Watkins (00:35:01):
Do not incentivize the review. What you can do is if someone leaves you a really nice review and they're an advocate of your practice and they refer clients and things like that, you can send them a handwritten thank you card with a gift card. You can send them flowers and say, thank you so much for being an advocate for our practice. But you can't do it upfront and say, Hey, do this for us and tit for tat. We're going to give you this bean if you give us that bean. No, you cannot do that. So please, that's a great big fat don't.

Eva Sheie (00:35:31):
You can have a drawing. You can enter everyone who writes a review into a drawing for a med spa credit or something like that, but it has to be available to all, and that's a really nice way to go about it. But the truth is that most people will do it without an incentive if you ask nicely and they were happy. It's not rocket surgery.

Andrea Watkins (00:35:53):
Exactly. Again, I think it really does just speak so highly, not even what the reviews say, but when you have a high amount like you asked earlier, that just means you have great relationships with your patients because they're willing to take their time. Time is finite and no one has enough of it right now, and even if it only takes 97 seconds, someone's willing to take that extra step to share their experience for your practice because you've developed a really great relationship with them. That in and of itself is just, it speaks volumes.

Eva Sheie (00:36:28):
Agree.

Andrea Watkins (00:36:30):
All right. Let's move on to the dos. What are the things that our must dos is stuff that we want to make sure that we're thinking about implementing with our teams and talking about?

Eva Sheie (00:36:41):
Some of them, obviously we've gone through prioritizing Google, but let them use whatever they want. Wherever they are comfortable writing, go ahead and just let them do that. I will caution though, there are sites that have been very untrustworthy for a very long time, and this is one of my side frustrations with AI is that it's citing health grades and vitals and for a decade we have not had to worry about those two sites because they are just trash. I don't know how they're still in business. Don't send your patients there Eventually, just like SEO did, the AIS will catch up and actually determine which sites are trustworthy and which ones aren't. We're not quite there, but we will get there. So have faith and don't send people to bad sites, actually, just it's not going to have longevity, so don't do it.

Andrea Watkins (00:37:39):
Just to interject for a really quick second, bad sites, so don't send people to bad sites, would you, from your expert view above the rest of us, what are those bad sites? You said vitals and health grades. Are there any other that we would not want to basically waste our patient's time on?

Eva Sheie (00:37:58):
Rate MDs was in that group too, and I think the way I would make those decisions is if you Google your name and look at what shows up or Google your name and the word reviews and see what shows up at the top of the page, those are the sites that you should use. And try that on a few different devices and from a few different accounts, and you will know pretty quickly what people are going to see. So that's how you make that decision is what are people seeing and that's where you would send them. But Google is going to be 90% of the time is where we're going to go.

Andrea Watkins (00:38:35):
Absolutely.

Eva Sheie (00:38:36):
And then build a system that automates the follow-up. So you're asking in person, you have a good system for that. Then use a tool and I can jump to what the tool needs to do right now since that's what we're talking about. And I can also put this list kind of in the show notes so that if you're looking for a tool to help you, there's some things that it has to have. One is review monitoring, is it looking at reviews for you and flagging them to you and in aggregate, so it's capturing everything. Does it have a tool that makes automating the ask easy? And there's one I won't mention by name, but they have a really neat phone shortcut where you can save a link, like you know how you can save something to your home screen on your phone, just like an app. Oh, Andrea, you don't know this.

Andrea Watkins (00:39:29):
Can you put that to the show notes? Also, can you show me how to do this?

Eva Sheie (00:39:33):
You can take any website. Let's say you want your patient Fi dashboard saved to your phone so that you can easily share that link with a patient in front of you. You can do this with a review tool too. So you would save your patient, apply link to your phone, and it's just in that little share square button, that share button that has the arrow. If you open that menu, there's one that says save to home screen.

Andrea Watkins (00:39:59):
Oh, okay.

Eva Sheie (00:40:00):
So it's like a bookmark. You just save that bookmark to your phone and then you can open it anytime and hit the share button again and text it to somebody.

Andrea Watkins (00:40:09):
Oh, perfect. I love that. That would make it, so that's what I would simple. And most practices have practiced cell phones that are basically at every station taking photos and we're getting Instagram content and we're doing all the things.

Eva Sheie (00:40:23):
That's exactly where you put it. Yes,

Andrea Watkins (00:40:27):
On the practice cell phones. Love that. Okay, great. Another hot tip of the day, let's go Eva.

Eva Sheie (00:40:34):
And then the other three things in a tool that you would want to have are a feed for your website. And so on your website you have a reviews page. Do not call it testimonials because no one will read them and then allow all of your reviews to show up on that page so that people can read reviews directly on your website. You want the ability to respond to reviews, and you should be responding to all of your reviews just to say thank you. Don't automate that, don't say the same thing every time, but just have some variations ready to go. And then also you want that automation to time the request correctly. So for people who've had surgery in the six to eight week window, you want to ask, and then, so the one place that I have built this out very successfully is in Clara, which is not a marketing platform. It's like a transactional,

Andrea Watkins (00:41:26):
It's like a texting platform basically.

Eva Sheie (00:41:28):
I think they all do this, but in Clara, we knew we could time the request by procedure. So we went in and one time was all we had to do was get that project done was to build a request based on the timeframe for that surgery. So if it was an A, I think we set it at four weeks. I don't remember exactly the details, but they were timed based it on the procedure and where the practice had the follow-up appointment scheduled and then it goes after that. So the trigger was that they showed up for their post-op.

Andrea Watkins (00:41:57):
Yeah. Also in EMRs you can actually set communications to go out. It's the opposite of an appointment reminder. So if you have an appointment coming up for your four week post-op on Tuesday, you might have something attached, a text or an email or both attached to that appointment type that says, we're going to send out this appointment reminder three days prior. You can do the exact same thing and set the timing for two hours after they walk out of our practice. We're going to send them this text with this link in it. We're going to send them this email with this link in it as soon as they check out of their appointment so that they have it, it's fresh in their mind, they're walking out, maybe they're sitting in traffic, whatever. No, we don't want people to text and drive. I'm just kidding. But you can just set your EMR up to do that. So when people check out they're getting the link from whatever specific appointment you want them. So let's move on to the spicy stuff. I really want to get into, and I literally, we just had a bad review removed off of Google for a client of mine yesterday. So what should we do? There's a lot of strategies for what should we do if we do get a bad review because they're going to happen. Eva, what are your pointers?

Eva Sheie (00:43:12):
Number one, stop and do nothing for at least overnight. I mean, for the most part, you got to wait for a minute because you're going to be defensive, you're going to be upset, you're going to want to get online and say why you're right and they're wrong. Just take a beat.

Andrea Watkins (00:43:33):
Not the place to do it. Google is not the place to do it.

Eva Sheie (00:43:36):
Dealing with a bad review with a clear head is absolutely step number one. And it is so important because even in, I just found myself the other day in a social media group where something happened at school and I was emotional and I was writing draft after draft of crazy responses, none of which I posted.

Andrea Watkins (00:43:57):
Sometimes you need to get it out, it's okay, just don't hit post or send.

Eva Sheie (00:44:02):
But you're not thinking about the long-term consequences of what you're writing and just the sort of flatness of writing online and what it means in the future when you're not emotional. That's what's most important here. So first of all, take a beat, gather information and wait until you're not emotional about it anymore. Then the next thing is, can you reach out to the patient and solve the problem? And why would you want to do that? Because if you can resolve a customer service issue with a patient, they're twice as likely to refer you and return in the future. So you have to see these as opportunities to win people's hearts and minds by solving the problem. Sometimes that's not possible, but that has to be the first thing you try to do is resolve it offline and then have them go back and edit it with how you solve the problem so that people can see in the future that you're wonderful and you're great listeners and you're great problem solvers, and that if something goes wrong to a future patient, you will take care of them because it is the real world and people aren't perfect and things happen.

(00:45:14):
And what's most important is how you handle those things. So if you sweep it under the rug, you'll suffer and you won't even know that you're suffering because someone who's unhappy, whose problems are unresolved is going to tell so many more people. The third thing is if you can't communicate directly, if this is a lost cause, perhaps it's escalating legally or something like that, the most important thing in that scenario is that you have to respond to future patients and not directly to you have to respond on that review, but you have to say things in a way that reflect that you're not going to let them just hang even if it feels horrible, which it does, but you have to say something like, we want to help. Please reach out to us directly at this number so that we can resolve your issue because everyone who reads that in the future is going to go, same thing I just said, if something happens to me, they're not going to ignore me.

Andrea Watkins (00:46:20):
No, that makes total sense. Also, the advice I was given with the reputation management company that I worked with when I was in the practice for several years, they had advised us, and I'm not an attorney, so this is not legal advice. Again, this is what we were advised from our team that did include an attorney, was that you can't actually even acknowledge that that person was your patient due to hipaa. So you cannot say, I'm so sorry, Andrea, that you had a bad experience. I know that there was a misunderstanding and blah, blah, blah. You can't even say any of that in response legally because of hipaa. So what you, to Eva's point, what's really important is that we address it and we say that we strive to help all patients have the best experience and the best outcome. Please try and contact our office manager or whomever in order to be able to speak about this experience that you're reporting, but you can't even acknowledge that they were your patient from what we were told.

Eva Sheie (00:47:25):
You're right, you can't. So you're responding to the world and not to the person in that scenario.And a lot of times, even in, I mean there's one in particular where I know they already know this. They always want to say something to kind of poke at the person directly, and every time I edit one of those I have to take out, that's the barb. Just don't do it because everyone can see it and hundreds or thousands of people will see that in the future and know that you are petty and vindictive. It's not worth it.

Andrea Watkins (00:48:02):
So a few other things that you can do, you get a bad review that we at Studio three marketing, we help our patients or our clients, excuse me, I'm so used to being in the practice, help our clients with, I always say patients,

Eva Sheie (00:48:15):
They're patients in a way,

Andrea Watkins (00:48:17):
All of our patients. So our clients at Studio three, they maybe have a bad review. A couple other things that I would recommend and that I have actually seen work, first of all, great strategy is do everything we've already been talking about to get reviews. So you can bury a bad one, address it like Eva said, but we want to definitely dilute them because when potential patients are looking at practices, maybe they'll look on the maps listing and they're going through and they see 5.0, 4.8, 4.7, 4.9, 4.6. Guess who they're not going to call. They're not going to call the person that has the 4.6 unless they're a personal referral or something they already know about you. They're going to say, oh, I'm going to call four practices and they're going to call the people with the best reviews. So you want to dilute those lower reviews so that you can get your overall rating up higher.

(00:49:13):
Additionally, whoever owns the Google My Business profile, you can report it to Google and you can say, because sometimes people will go on there and they're not even people that you have record of being your patients. And then you can also, so for our clients, we're all on a Slack channel, and if one of our clients gets a bad review that is not legitimate or just something that's completely outlandish, you can just get as many people on your team as possible to report it as false. And then Google, it's basically go to the review and then there's three little dots, like a little hamburger up on the right hand corner of the review. You can click on it and it'll say report review, report the review. And then I think there's probably a list of about eight or nine different reasons that you can report it for being false or not having anything to do with the practice, et cetera, et cetera.

(00:50:07):
Click on one of those reasons and then Google will flag it, they will review it, and the more people that you can get to report it, and if you're actually writing in to dispute the review, it took this last one that we just got taken down yesterday that was just absurd. It took us about two weeks. So it's not like it's going to happen overnight. Don't get your hopes up about that. But there are things that you can also do in addition to all these great things that Eva is saying to do outwardly and publicly. You can be doing all of these other things behind the scenes with Google to try and have it removed as well.

Eva Sheie (00:50:46):
Yeah, I was going to bring that up too. Reporting it. You should add me to that select channel so we can also help you report those.

Andrea Watkins (00:50:55):
Okay. Added,

Eva Sheie (00:50:57):
Okay. I love helping. I feel like we're in the review Justice League.

Andrea Watkins (00:51:02):
Yes, absolutely. Vigilantes of sort.

Eva Sheie (00:51:05):
There's nothing more painful than getting a fake bad review. And so Google has ways of knowing and reporting it as the official mechanism for getting those taken down. So definitely utilize that and then recruit other people to help you report it. It's great.

Andrea Watkins (00:51:22):
Yep. Use your friends, use your team, everybody that you can use, your marketing companies, whoever it is that understands the importance of this, that will actually take the action for you to help support you. So Eva, we're talking about kind what to do about bad reviews, but is there a better way? Are there ways to prevent bad reviews?

Eva Sheie (00:51:46):
I'm so glad you asked, not because I put it in your outline, but because it really is, it's the heart and soul of the whole thing. How do you prevent bad reviews? It's by having a practice culture that celebrates excellence and impeccable patient care. And so in five years of serving, I learned that there are practices who do a great job with every single patient every single time they're out there. What do those practices do? They have really good patient-centered processes that make sure nobody falls through the cracks, and they're not the people that are famous. They're not the ones who are all over Instagram with millions of followers. They're just quietly taking care of people and doing great work, and their reputations carry them forward because all those people are out there then referring their friends and family, and that's what it's all about. And so I think the most dismaying part of my serving lifetime was finding out the hard way that some people who we think are the greatest had really poor patient care, and it showed up in their survey results. This is many, many years ago now. So some of these people are even retired, and it's not relevant who they were, but it taught me a lot about how you actually get good reviews and it's by being great.

(00:53:21):
Imagine that you don't have to buy another tool to do surveying, but if you do survey, then you can uncover those things ahead of time and you can start to systemically fix things in your patient processes. And so where I worked was real patient ratings and it's still around and it's still wonderful, and people who are on it swear by it because it helps you prevent service issues, which is much bigger than preventing bad reviews. It's about being excellent at taking care of people.

Andrea Watkins (00:53:57):
And the rest will come when that service and that experience is really there for the patients.

Eva Sheie (00:54:02):
Let's say you're front desk or you're a coordinator in a practice where you know that there are systemic issues related to patient care that need to be addressed. How would you coach somebody in that situation, Andrea, to raise those issues in a way that's productive and professional?

Andrea Watkins (00:54:23):
Well, ideally, you're having one-on-ones with your leaders on a regular basis, and we've talked about that on several of these episodes as well. So bringing that to your leader in a one-on-one and saying, Hey, I've identified X, Y, and Z. Here's some opportunity for us, and here's some suggestions and recommendations that I have just based upon the little bit that they're a part of that. But in your one-on-ones, that is the perfect opportunity to bring that up to your leader and say, here's something that seems to be a challenge or something that maybe is subpar or looking at something suboptimal here. Here's some ideas that I might have or how can I help make this better? So it's really you as a person in your role taking that to your leader because also that just makes you look like a freaking rockstar, an absolute rockstar. If you're identifying how can we do better? I have some recommendations. I might not have the right answer, but I do want to help with that.

Eva Sheie (00:55:21):
If you know that patient satisfaction equals revenue, then this all is really easy to argue for. And even if you don't, can't come in straight up with facts. Nobody can argue with the fact that happier patients spend more money and refer more of their friends and family. And so if you're in a place where someone's disagreeing with you about that, you probably maybe could consider making a change.

Andrea Watkins (00:55:51):
You might need to find a new place. If that's the place you're at, you might Yeah, exactly. Might want to find a new opportunity. And there are so many practices out there that absolutely live and die for those types of team members because when you're taking an ownership mindset of how can I help us be the very best that we can be, there are practices out there that are going to do anything to keep you.

Eva Sheie (00:56:18):
There's one more thing I want to throw in here before we wrap it up for the day, and this is such a big topic. If you are listening and you have questions about reviews or you have specific use cases or situations that you want us to address, we would love to hear from you. I think the thing we haven't mentioned yet is dark social and what's happening in secret groups. And so if you are a mom or if you're in any of these Facebook groups where people are united around, a common thing, and the example I'll give you is there's a kid's clothing group that I'm in where the primary topic is a specific set of clothing brands that we dress our kids in. Okay. This is what I have in common with all these ladies. I'm in quite a few of these. I'm in one called the coach's wife because I'm married to a football and lacrosse coach, and that's a unique group of women who have similar struggles. This kind of conversation happens in that group all the time, too. The other one is the kids' clothing group, and then there's another one where mom's over 40. So there's a group for moms who had babies after 40. We all have these unique shared experiences that bring us together.

(00:57:37):
And in those groups, I would say at least once a week, somebody says, I'm thinking about having surgery. I live in this city and I need somewhere to go. And these conversations are happening in these groups, and you will never see them unless you're in them. Those are more powerful than reviews because

Andrea Watkins (00:57:58):
Oh, for sure.

Eva Sheie (00:57:59):
You're hearing about a doctor or you're hearing about somebody's experience in that group, and then you might go read reviews, but you've started with a recommendation from someone you don't truly know, but you have shared common

Andrea Watkins (00:58:13):
Experience. Yeah, you have shared,

Eva Sheie (00:58:16):
And that social proof is so much more powerful than reviews. And so I think the reason I want to call that out before we go back to real jobs for the day is that if you aren't aware of those and you don't know that that's happening, you need to be aware of it because that's where it ties all the way back to having great patient experiences all the time. Because there are things you cannot control out there on the internet. And that is the biggest one.

Andrea Watkins (00:58:48):
Absolutely. We used to have, when I was in the practice weight loss group up in Wyoming and in the states north of Colorado, and quite literally dozens of patients from this one weight loss moms Facebook group because we did a lot of skin removal, body lift type after massive weight loss patients. And what they said about their experience and their outcomes with our practice is what got us. But we would've never known had they not told us, oh yeah, I'm part of the Facebook Wyoming moms group. That's the only way. We didn't have access to obviously what they said or to any of those personal referrals that they were providing each other. But based on the experience and outcome they have, we would've had no idea had they not told us that that's where they had come from. Interesting. I love that you bring that up. That's kind of something I totally forgot about. Wonderful. Anything else before we wrap this up, Eva, that you want to touch on with the reviews?

Eva Sheie (00:59:46):
I think I've said enough.

Andrea Watkins (00:59:49):
Seven years wrapped in down into 70 minutes that'll then be cut. I love it. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Obviously it's always a pleasure and I think with our decades of experience, I just am so excited that we can share best practices and really help our listeners figure out the best way forward in how to get reviews, what to do, what not to do, and if they do get a bad one, obviously what to do about that. So thank you guys all for listening. We're so glad that you're tuning in every Tuesday and we'll see you again next week.

Eva Sheie (01:00:24):
Thanks, Adrea.

Blake Lucas (01:00:28):
Got a wild customer service story or a sticky patient situation? Send us a message or voicemail. If your tale makes it into our "She did what?" segment, we'll send a thank you gift you'll actually love. Promise, no cheap swag here.

Andrea Watkins (01:00:40):
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