The Review Revolution: Unleashing the Power of Online Reviews

Eugene Shatsman: In 2017, when consumers were asked, 33% of consumers said they care about reviews for medical and healthcare businesses. In 2023, that number went to 80% of them. 80% of people will not visit a medical or healthcare business without looking and specifically reading the reviews.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I am Bethany Fishbein, CEO of the Power Practice and host of the Power Hour Optometry Podcast. And I’m really looking forward to a great conversation today. My guest is Eugene Shatsman. Eugene is the Managing Partner and Business Growth Strategist for National Strategic Group. He’s been speaking to optometrists about the importance of social reputation since 2015 before most people even knew what Google was his company helps practice owners do real strategic marketing rather than just running with scattered plans. And we’re really here today to talk about the power of reviews. We get questions a lot from our clients and I see them online about reviews in general. Do I need to get them I got one, how do I respond to this? And Eugene is here to talk about it. So thank you so much for joining me.

Eugene Shatsman: It’s such a pleasure to be here. I love the group and I love collaborating. And this is definitely a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. Bethany.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Absolutely. So talk about reviews in general. I still run into people who don’t feel that it’s a super important thing to pay attention to. They don’t have many they feel like they’re doing okay. Like how important is it to focus on your online reputation?

Eugene Shatsman: Well, so I think I’d like to back up a little bit and I want to answer that question, because I think that you know, the one key stat that you have to remember is that 99% of consumers check reviews at least once per month before making a buying decision. And 87% of consumers use Google to evaluate local businesses literally every step of the way. So we’ll talk about how important all of that is in just a second. But I think we have to realize that in the last 15 years or so, marketing in itself has taken a huge, huge shift. So when we think about growing our practices and when we think about growing our practices with whether it’s with new patients with referrals from existing patients or even, you know, past patients had that haven’t been in for a couple of years that may be being wooed by competitors. All of that is marketing and marketing has kind of shifted over the last 15 years. And this, I think very fascinating shift as really all of our consumer behavior has shifted with the advent of two really, really important things. You know, when we think about the idea that if 20 years ago, we did not have all pieces of information in the palm of our hands, right? The iPhone came out in June of 2007. And Android I think came out shortly thereafter in 2008. And it wasn’t really widespread until like 2009 2008 The truth is what marketing used to be was all interruption-based marketing for the entire history of marketing the entire century of marketing. When marketing kind of first came to exist. It was interruption right like newspaper ads, right? The first newspapers are being handed out and there’s ads in there that say look away from the news. Look at something that’s going on here. Then we go to Radio and again that We interrupt this important broadcast with a message from our sponsors, and then you listen to the message from the sponsors, TV, same exact thing. The concept is somebody is doing something that is unrelated to the message that you’re trying to provide. And then all of a sudden they’re interrupted with a marketing message. And that’s the truth with direct mail. That’s the truth of billboards. Literally every other mechanism of marketing that we’ve ever really thought about. The entire marketing industry was about interrupting someone with something that stands out and something that they’re not really paying attention to at the moment to get it into their mind so that when they’re ready to make a shopping decision, they pick your business, right? This was, you know, this is what marketing had been for a century or longer up until, you know, entered two important inventions, Google as a search engine or really kind of the invention of the search engine, the widespread use of the search engine, and then the ability to do that on a phone to make a decision at any point in time wherever you are. You don’t have to log onto a computer you don’t have to wait for your AOL to fire up your modem to ding. And then what’s happened is and I talk about this a lot is that marketing has transitioned from this interruption-based marketing to intent-based marketing. And over the last 15 years, we’ve evolved this concept of intent-based marketing and getting better and better and better at giving people what they want, at the exact moment that they need it. And so you think about how Google plays into that and how Google reviews play into that. You think about that idea that this Google snack pack that Google pack of three that shows up. Every time you do a search whether you’re looking for pizza or a dentist or an eye doctor or or an optical mirror you the reality is that 75 And we’ve tracked this was so much detail 75% of all of the conversions, conversions, being calls, appointment schedules, everything that has to do with turning eyeballs into butts and seats 75% of all conversions, start in the snack pack and you think about what information was available. It’s very limited. The information is the business name. There’s like a tiny little picture that you can click on. And the one of the biggest decision drivers is reviews. So when you think about how important our reviews think about from your own consumer perspective, when you’re searching for a new restaurant or when you’re searching for a particular retailer, or for any real service, whether it’s a plumber on a Saturday night because pipes backed up or whatever, you know, what are your decision drivers and some of the decision drivers are is this business available? Is this business, local, whatever. But Google has really proven over time that one of the biggest decision drivers for us is in fact reviews. So it’s not surprising at all that 99% of consumers checkout reviews before making a buying decision, right?

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I mean, it’s a crazy number, but when you’re talking about it, I’m thinking about how I buy things. And I’m like fascinated you know, the idea that it’s not even somebody advertising or marketing to me, like when I want something I’m going and looking for it. So I don’t have to remember a commercial or a sign or a billboard or I don’t have to remember anything I just type it into the search. Engine. And you’re absolutely right, those first couple come up. And most of the time, sometimes I’m not even looking at the individual reviews. I’m looking at an aggregate rating of okay, they’ve got 600 reviews and 4.9 stars. People must like them. And then I just click on the phone number to call.

 Eugene Shatsman: Yup, and that’s, you know, so you’re absolutely right. And this is what marketing has become. It has gone from interrupting people all the time to serving their intent to serving the intent when they when they raised their hand and say I am interested in this particular service, a good marketer and every one of us as a marketer, right? All of us are salespeople we sell to our patients, whether it’s getting them to commit to a specific care regimen or getting them to show up for their eye exams, or we’re selling in our opticals but all of us are salespeople. All of us are also marketers and we can’t kind of draw our head in the sand and say that we can’t be good marketers. And in order to be good marketers, we have to serve that intent well. And part of serving that intent well, is being deliberate about our review strategy, and understanding how important those reviews are, in fact to our businesses. I’ll give you a couple more stats in 2017 You’re absolutely right. We’ve been doing this for for a long time. We were probably that the first reputation management company in the eye care space. And I mean, that was That was wild, because I think we realized that people were going to be looking at these things back in 2015 2016 but in 2017, when consumers were asked 33% of consumers said they care about reviews for medical and healthcare business. In 2023. That number went to 80% that 80% of people will not visit a medical or health care business without looking and specifically reading their reviews. And by the way, you know what’s funny is childcare is absolutely last on the list as like the second it’s either last or second to last on the list, right near locksmiths, which is also kind of odd people seem to care so much more about two really big industries in 2023 of the top two industries for reviews are home services. So you know, plumber, electrician, that kind of thing. And the second industry is healthcare, any sort of healthcare services, and we saw that number jump and skyrocket right around the COVID times so when people were wondering, you know, they weren’t expecting to get very reliable or they weren’t, they weren’t sure what to expect when they were going to a doctor right around COVID we saw that people started reading reviews and shifted consumer behavior and consumer behavior patterns to really zoom in on reviews that those practices have.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: We definitely see that shift with patients because you used to ask patients, how did you hear about our office and some of them would say I was referred by a friend some of them would say, through the insurance company, some of them would say, Google or online and what we noticed is everybody started saying Google or online. And then when you asked him about it, like during times where we’ve been trying to figure out what’s working, what’s not working, and probably doing some of that scattered strategy that you work to get people away from, you know, we’re saying okay, like, do you remember what you were searching for? And then people would tell us, Oh, no, actually, my friend told me to come here. But I went online to check it out for myself or I saw you on the list from the insurance. And then I Googled your practice and it looked like people were saying a lot of good things, so I came. So they have choices where maybe they’re getting information, but that’s like narrowing down a shortlist. And then the patient or consumer feels like they themselves can choose based on their own information that they’re going to go out and gather. Eugene before we get like into reviews just because I’m curious and something you said made me think about it. So when you’re talking about this intent based that somebody wants something right now and so they’re gonna go and look for it and you just need to make sure you’re there. Does that also encompass unstated intent? Like obviously if I look for eye doctor near me, then guess I’m looking for an eye doctor, but sometimes people might be searching, blurry vision all of a sudden, or maybe they’re starting to look at some online glasses sites. Like is their secret behavior that demonstrates intent that leads to marketing this is probably a whole other podcast. 

Eugene Shatsman: Oh yeah. No, this is we get beyond this topic for three hours if you want, but I’ll give you the short of it, which is that that’s really what marketers are focused on today is when we’re thinking about intent based marketing, we’re really thinking about it and maybe taking it out of the airspace and think about a vacation. If you’re thinking about a vacation. It’s really unlikely that you’re going to Google you know, trips to Hawaii and then like, enter your credit card right there. You know, the first thing that shows up you’re just gonna enter your credit card and you know, bam, trip booked and five minutes, right, there’s this concept of top of funnel and bottom of funnel research. And so top of funnel research is when you’re checking out the resorts and you’re looking at the different pictures and you’re spending some time thinking about what are the experiences that you want your family to have on vacation, and you’re really Googling and researching all of those things. And the site that kind of can deliver all of that information most efficiently is most likely to ultimately get your business. So if there was some, you know, Hawaii vacation trips, detail, all the stuff you must do on your first visit to Hawaii, that site would really serve that top of funnel intent when you’re when you’re doing your research. And then over time, that site can continue to market to you because this is where marketers think, Okay, well, that’s top of funnel. That’s just the kind of research that we can get into middle of funnel and middle of the funnel is usually when you can exchange a piece of information like you would be willing, at some point maybe to enter information and say, if a website were to say we monitor prices on Hawaiian vacations all day long, and if something drops, we want to notify you would you be interested in that? You might say yeah, you know, I’ll enter my email for that. And so you would give that piece of information for something that’s in the middle of the funnel before you turn over your credit card, which is what we’ll call the bottom of the funnel. The interesting thing and you know, when you apply that back to health care, so we are always trying to find ways to create content to serve the top of the funnel, but that’s only after and this is where you know this is so true in the optometry space is that there are the decisions for an eye exam and for eye care are made extremely quickly. You know, the sales cycle to buy a car is like nine months or something. The sales cycle for a vacation is frequently two or three months. The sales cycle for an eye doctor, sometimes it’s less than 24 hours. I remember that I have a need or my glasses broke or I just you know, you just got fed up with some blurry vision or whatever and like I need to I need help now. I need to get this box checked off for my kids school is coming up and I need to get them an eye exam. You know, like that kind of thing and so those decisions when the sales cycle is shorter, our focus is so much more on the lower level of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel intent, which you know, reviews are such a huge part of that because he can’t really miss you know, you don’t have as much time to educate but for example for higher value services like dry eye, myopia management, things that don’t seem as urgent but may seem like you know, under especially more expensive elective services, that’s where there’s a lot of education material that needs to happen to serve the intent at the top of the funnel and gradually move people down the bottom of the funnel giving them more and more information and pulling them in. So hopefully that helps that’s like the short course primer on like what I what a three hour discussion on this could look like.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Absolutely. It’s just kind of mind blowing to think about I know it’s the world that you live in all day long, but the amount of computering that’s affecting mine and everybody else is buying decisions. It’s just it’s just kind of staggering so,

Eugene Shatsman: I love that word computing

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: So all right reviews are important. Is it just Google that they’re important or do you worry about Yelp and Facebook and if there are some others health quests. I still get a yellow pages site comes up everyone’s like is Google it or do you do have to care about the other ones?

Eugene Shatsman: Here’s what I can tell you. And there’s a really great survey that comes out every single year by a company called Bright local, they’re actually one of our vendor partners. And they you know when we sit there like kids in a candy shop waiting for the survey that come out every single February about consumer behavior related to reviews the previous year. And so this year survey, I think, says something like Google, I mean, Google has been the dominant player for a really long time. Now this is across all different businesses. So you think about you know, when we were talking about vacations, like TripAdvisor is a really good niche, specific piece. And you know, in some, in some cases, you know, health grades works well, in some cases for particular medical professions. Now, Google has 87% of market share, people say when you When asked which sites or apps that we use to evaluate local businesses in the last period of time, Google is 87% of the time I use Google. Yelp is next and Facebook is next. And but Yelp only has 40 some percent of market share and it’s shrinking. And people don’t take Yelp as seriously because people do believe and I think that businesses have gotten good at communicating this. People do believe that Yelp doesn’t publish all the reviews. You know, and if you if you ever want to see the hidden reviews, you have to like go to the bottom and yet they show hidden reviews, but people do believe that Yelp doesn’t publish all the reviews, partly because when they publish Yelp reviews, they don’t see their own reviews. And that’s led to a little bit of consumer distrust. So that’s actually down from 53 to 48%. This year. And Facebook has also now Facebook was 48% last year and is 46% this year, and which means people check Facebook, but not nearly as much as Google. I think Google is still primary. You do want to be mindful of your reputation on both Yelp and Facebook. And there are fewer things you can do on Yelp. And people do think that Facebook reviews are a lot more likely to be fake than both Google and Yelp reviews. And so you know, you can solicit a lot of fake Facebook reviews, and people trust them less. But for the most part, I think Google is your dominant platform. And a far and above just kind of blows the rest out of the water.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: So let’s talk about how to get them and it happens that people will have a good experience in the office. They’re raving about it to the staff on the way out. This was the best this is the best doctor I’ve ever seen. I love your selection. I’m so excited to get my new glasses. And you just want them to say that like Okay, great. Can I bottle this and share it with everyone else? How do you get them to take that next step and post their good experience on Google? 

Eugene Shatsman: Well, I’m gonna tell you a story of just kind of went right back where we were in 2016, where our organization was kind of one of the first ones and you’re gonna think this is hilarious in the way that we solicited reviews back then, but we were really the first organization and I care to solicit reviews, because we recognize this was an important decision driver for consumers. And this is what we used to do. We would call a practice when to take your patient list of all the people you saw last week, and we would have people in our office who would pick up the phone and call those patients and say hey, you know, this is Eugene, I’m calling in conjunction with Somerset eye care. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about the experience that you had in the office last week. Would you mind spending a couple of minutes with me? And it’s fascinating but you know, regionally called people in New York, it would be a very different discussion than if you call people in Kansas, but for the most part, we were able to have a genuine conversation and the conversation was you know, tell me about your experience. Tell me about the doctor. Tell me about your glasses shopping experience. And we would collect a lot of really valuable feedback for the practice. In addition to at the very end, we would ask a question, which would be something like, Bethany, thank you so much for the really valuable conversation. Is it okay if I asked you for a favor? And most of the time because we built the relationship you’d say Yeah, sure. What do you need? Say, Well, you know, your experience is just so positive. And it’s so valuable. And so, so great to hear, you know, and other people would really benefit from hearing that experience as well, especially if they’re evaluating the practice. Would you mind if I sent you a link and you could click on the link and there’s this thing called Google and you can leave a review on this thing called Google. And people would say, okay, yeah, that’s interesting. And then we would do that, and we would follow up with them. And some people didn’t even have like a way to log into Google or to leave a review at the time. But it’s kind of you think about the psychology associated with that, which is you’ve built a relationship with someone and then you’re leveraging that relationship to ask for a favor. And then you’re leveraging that favor to ask for, you know, public facing positive feedback. So you know, a lot of the tools, you know, patient communication tools for patient care, solution reach. They all have tools associated with trying to solicit reviews and those tools are frequently not turned on by practices. You’d be surprised how often they’re not. And the reason by the way, people don’t turn them on is because they say Well, I’m afraid of the occasional negative review what if somebody has a bad experience, and then I have a bad review. There are ways to get around that I don’t want to discuss in this forum yet because there’s some of the things that are in line with Google’s policy to sentiment track and to be able to tell, you know, to have patients who didn’t have a great experience, you know, go in one direction patients who had a great experience go in a different direction. But that has to do there’s, you know, certain policies that Google publishes that you have to follow if you’re going to do that. And we have some successful techniques to do that. But for the most part, the reality is that you are aware that your patients are generally happy, and I think we’re all naturally aware of the that it’s a six to one ratio, that you know, if somebody had a bad experience, they’re six times more likely to publish it than if they had a good experience. But think about the patients in your practice, which is that you know, on average, you’re probably going to have a 10 to one or 20 to one ratio of patients who had you know, maybe even a 30 to one ratio of patients who had a really good experience with your practice versus a patient who didn’t have a really good experience. And so the occasional negative reviews get through, you know, if you’re not sentiment tracking, and if the occasional negative reviews get through, there are ways to deal with them. And we’ll we’ll talk about that in a second. But I think that the truth is that you do want a lot of reviews and for the most part, if most of your patients were leaving reviews, you wouldn’t be able to get that and so you know, no matter what tool, what software or what group you use, There’s just plenty of those tools out there. And many of our patient communication tools that we all kind of use a second nature, we just have to check the box and get it to start soliciting reviews for us,

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Which is far easier than individually calling every single patient and 

Eugene Shatsman: yeah, that was so fun. Yeah, I have people in my office who still have a little bit of PTSD from calling patients and populated metro areas. 

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Yes, I’m sure that middle America somebody I’m imagining an elderly person in Wisconsin and she can’t get off the phone. Like why the hell you call on me?

Eugene Shatsman: You’re gonna hear some ladies cats mercy or Chicago lander is how they can tell you but they can only tell you in 30 seconds because they got an important meeting coming up.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: For sure. We get that question sometimes about that fear of doing a negative review and what sometimes we’ve had offices do a survey for a while that doesn’t go anywhere. Just to kind of help them get a pulse on how people are feeling about their practice. And then, you know, if you do that for a couple of weeks or a month and you’re getting all positive responses, you can make the leap that if you sent out a review link, it would probably be the same. I know that people have the ability to kind of comb through and hand pick certain patients who they had a good experience and try to exclude the ones that had a bad one. And although the idea’s there I think the thing that happens is that it’s such a low priority task. And a lot of offices, that they never take the time to do it or send out so few that they end up not getting anything. Do you do you have any stats on the number of people if you send a request to 100 people to review the practice how many actually will

Eugene Shatsman: Yeah, so it’s about one to 2% of people who you reach out to are actually going to leave a review unless you had a really genuine connection in the office where you said, By the way, where you kind of pre programmed them. This is why I kind of told the story, because if you pre program people initially and say one of the things that’s really important to us is making sure that the experience that you experienced here in the office, which we invest in so dearly is reflected online for other patients who are looking for an eye doctor and who may want to be considering multiple locations. And so one of the things we really appreciate is if you’re going to get a review link when you leave here, if you can take time to leave a review, wherever they have the best relationship with the practice and if you ask that question, just simply just pre programming them. We’ve noticed that sometimes you can get a 5x Multiple you can get 5% of your patients to leave reviews you just simply by just pre programming them and saying you’re gonna get this link. It’s really important to us, we really appreciate it when people feel like they’re doing you a favor rather than, hey, this is completely transactional. It feels a lot better to them to be able to say okay, yeah, I will take the time to do this. You know, again, just to remember that you’re unhappy patients are six times more likely to leave a negative review and they can do that without you soliciting that feedback. So they’re they’re probably going if they’re really unhappy without you sending them a review link. They’re probably going online leaving a review regardless,

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: you can’t screen here because just the the numbers game of it if you’re seeing 100 exams a week even if you’re sending a link to every single one, you’re likely to get one, maybe two reviews. And then if you pick out only the positive ones, and those are the ones that are are memorably positive, so whatever percentage that is, and then the positive or less likely to leave the review in the first place. Like you’re not going to get any if you do that, you have to just do it.

Eugene Shatsman: Exactly right. And when I say that 1% That 1% is kind of the average across you know, weaved solution reach those types of things. There are techniques and again, we have some tools that we’ve developed that, you know, kind of help number one, they can kind of sentiment track in line with Google’s policies so they can kind of send to the positive patients one way or the negative patients another way. Another thing that we’ve tested and by the way you can you can make adjustments inside of leave in terms of how what’s the message that gets sent out? We’re constantly running split tests on six different messages across what gets people to click. And so you know what gets people to click and say, Okay, I will leave review. And we’re not just running that split tests on messages, but also time of day and all that the number of times that you can ask for a review without pissing somebody off. And the truth is, you know, there are techniques to move those numbers out incrementally, just a little bit, you know, you can go from 1% to 2%, from 2% to two and a half percent. And that’s, you know, you think about that that’s doubled or tripled the initial success rate, but it’s still not a huge number of patients. You know, if you saw 1000 patients over a period of time, you’re still kind of your best case scenario is, you know, maybe 15, 20 reviews of those, if you’re not building that kind of expectation inside the doors of your practice.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: So let’s talk about them once they do start coming in and you mentioned categories or types of reviews, which is I’m interested to learn more about because to me, they’re either good or awful. And that’s how I see them and wow, that made my day or Oh, okay, I’m gonna go curl up and cry in a corner. So talk about the different types of reviews beyond positive and negative.

Eugene Shatsman: Well, and the reason I categorize them is because we have to think about how important it is to respond to reviews in today’s marketplace. So you have to think about that. The same data. The same survey shows that 88% of consumers are likely to use a business if they can see that the business owner responds to all reviews whether positive or negative. That stat goes down to 60% of consumers. If they’re only responding to negative reviews. The inverse of that status, you know, only 12% of people state that they would not be affected by the business owner responding to reviews right to both positive and negative reviews. So we have to think about responding as as reviews come in. It’s a method of communication. And it’s a method of communication that shouldn’t be left open-ended, we should respond to them. The one thing you have to remember is that when you respond to a Google review, whoever left that review gets a copy of your response. So you have to be thoughtful about that. Just kind of keep that in mind. But you know, the, we have to be thoughtful about that. When you think about how it is that you’re actually going to respond when I think about types of reviews. The positive have two types. Number one is just a rating, you know, just like a quick little star rating, you know, and then the second one has some sort of words associated with them, right like you’ve have a sentence, so best best eye exam I ever had, or like, you know, in some cases, it’s a really lengthy review. And so, you know, somebody leaves an entire paragraph describing kind of all elements of their interaction. So those are your positives. Now responding to positive reviews, is generally you know, kind of a labor of love. And but I would encourage staying away in one rule I would I would stay away from is responding in a call kind of like what looks like an automated manner. So it looks like you’re you have the canned response for every single review that has a rating five stars. Thank you for your rating. John, five stars. Thank you for your rating. Steve, five stars. Thank you for your rating, Susan like that makes it look(like bracker insert name here.) Right, right. Right, exactly. And so what we don’t want to do is have an inauthentic we use this as an opportunity to showcase an authentic connection with a patient and you should really showcase that hey, you know, patients who love us, we love them back. I use the we tell people frequently to you know, use the ratings as an opportunity to just include a value statement about your practice, you know, thank you for your rating. Steve. We’re proud to be the Greater Cleveland areas, some of your eye care practice, you know, we’re proud to have a great selection of frames, we’re proud and some something that you know, maybe Shosh highlights something about your practice. That is also an SEO trick, because if you think about when we were talking about intent, the practices that show up in that pack of three that snack pack, you know, that’s not an accident. Google has a very sophisticated set of algorithms that determine that. And one of the algorithms is, you know, are you able to serve that intent? And so one of the things that Google does, and it’s one of like 60 or 70 things that Google does is it reads the reviews and the responses of the reviews to determine does this practice do what the intent is, you know, including so, you know, I would still respond to the ratings and I would respond to the ratings in a relatively short way. And then the words we usually tell people match the length of, you know, somebody says, great eye exam period, you know, you say, you know, thank you, John, we’re so happy that you had a great eye exam, you know, whatever, whatever it is, we’re really happy that you had a positive experience in our practice, whatever that looks like, but that’s, that’s the length. If somebody has, like, writes a paragraph about, you know, their overall experience, it would feel pretty, you know, pretty trite to just write thanks. Right. So you would, you would want to match a little bit more in terms of length as to what they what they talk about. And, you know, we’re so glad that you had a great experience with our staff. We’re so we’re so pleased that you know, you basically just riff off anything that they said you picked out products that you really liked, and we’re so grateful that we were able to help you and your family this particular type of situation, whatever it was, but you just kind of riff off of exactly what they had. You show some genuine connection, based off of the length of the review that they had, and those are far and few between, right like the really long reviews. So those are your positive types. 

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Before you get into the negative though, just as you were talking about responding to the positives. Great eye exam, and you your response that you said was you know, thanks so much. So glad you had a great eye exam or something. And I know that the concern about HIPAA comes up all the time because I think that there is stuff out there, making everybody afraid to acknowledge even that somebody set foot in their office for fear of sharing protected health information. So even if the patient says I was there, if we say yes, you were, is that a HIPAA violation like how do you know where that line is? Because there are people practices I’ve spoken to, that aren’t replying to any reviews at all, because they don’t know what they can and can’t say.

Eugene Shatsman: Yeah. And you know, I mean,  Bethany, we’ve responded to 1000s of 1000s of reviews. And over time, this kind of we’ve got we’ve honed the craft a little bit. And I think the advice that we’ve gotten and I don’t claim to be a HIPAA attorney, I don’t claim to be a sophisticated HIPAA expert, but we’ve talked to a quite a few of them. And the feedback that we’ve gotten is that when someone puts something out in the public domain you can reference whatever they put out in the public domain, without getting into any trouble. You know, they put something out into into the public domain. And they said, You know, I was at your practice, then, you know, the response is, thank you for coming to our practice. It’s as simple as that. And now we’re to want to avoid ever happening and this is what I see happening all the time. And I you know, it’s like, I’ve rewritten so many responses to negative reviews where people do write it I would say, somebody says, you know, the lenses were really overpriced, and, you know, unfortunately, you know, these guys are a complete rip off, you know, I expect that to get something affordable, and they get into some sort of explanation of like, well, in your particular case, because you have keratoconus you need scleral lenses and sterile lenses are the only way to fix this particular situation. You really want to get away from anything at all discussing anything that the patient didn’t put out in the public domain, but they’re the ones who put something out in the public domain. Then you get to you get to leverage whatever they put out on the public domain. You just get to acknowledge and respond.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: So if the patient says I had an eye exam, I got a great pair of glasses you can say so glad you had a great eye exam and love.

Eugene Shatsman: We hope you enjoy your glasses. Yes. 

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Okay. Got it. Okay. So you should be responding to every review, even the ones that are just stars with no words. Talk about the negative ones because that’s where it gets tricky. It’s hard as a business owner, you’ve built this practice. It’s your baby. You put your whole soul into it, and then somebody trashes it online. (Oh, yeah.) My classification on those types is once we deserved and once we didn’t, I’m sure you have a better classification system.

Eugene Shatsman:  Well, so and it does feel like a sock in the gut. And I feel it on behalf of my clients. You know, we have 1000s of over 1000 practices and doctors locations that we work with coast to coast and like every time it just like feels like just a little bit of a jab in the in the gut. Every time one of those comes in but you learn to kind of manage all of them. And so we have essentially four categories. And the categories are number one is just the rating. And so there’s like somebody just like one star, literally no comments right? And the second is what we’ll call the attention grabber. The third one is a lie. Just to complete boldfaced, straight out lie. And the fourth one is a true customer service opportunity, like the ones you deserve probably is the is the one that you would describe. So let’s talk about each one of them kind of dissect them for just a second, the rating. There’s a really simple, straightforward way to respond to that. And quite frankly, not a lot of people when you just have a rating. They when you think about the typical consumer, how much weight do they place on that particular review? Well, not that much, because there’s no explanation. And so all you’re trying to do when you get a rating is to show if you got one one star rating or one two star rating and there’s no detail is just to show that you care about your customer service. So my kind of go to approach to this is to verify whether that person is a patient or not based off of their Google username, if their username is you know, Mike Smith, and you know, that’s a pretty common name and that could be a patient or if it’s like, or if it’s a more unique name, whatever. We usually there’s two two ways to go. And one way is to say, you know, what we can always respond with and we really care about our patient experience period or something like that, but it just kind of a value statement about the practice and we’ve been here for 22 years and we really care about our patient experience. We take every patient’s experience very, very seriously. Please let us know what we could have done better. Please reach out to us. Here’s you know, contact information, whatever for the practice. And if they are 100%, not a patient and you say we would love to contact you but we tried to check our patient records and couldn’t find your name and our patient records kind of you know, slyly debunking the myth that like, maybe this person isn’t even real, right? Like that kind of thing. But it’s kind of a very, very, very genuine kind of a thing that kind of makes it look like you really care about customer service from the very beginning. The intention, the attention grabbers are the ones that I believe you can correct and the customer service ones kind of fit into the same category but the attention grabbers are the ones that somebody is leaving a review not because they want to trash your practice, but because they just want to get someone’s attention at the top. We’re like I worked with your, you know, silly office manager or your optician and they told me that they you know, there’s nobody else I can talk to. So I’m pissed off. I’m going home and I’m leaving a negative review in hopes that somebody will call me and correct the situation. Yeah, and that happens a lot. And so usually our protocol when we get a negative review, we let our clients know it was when we monitor our clients and their services, you can subscribe to that. Do this for you as well. But like, you get a negative review, within 12 hours. We want you to practice owner, the practice owner, somebody is somebody at the practice. Usually we establish a process for this, but we want you to reach out to find that patient to reach out to them, especially if there’s some detail associated with that and to really do whatever needs to be done to make it right. And then after you’ve done whatever needs to be done to make it right, you now have two options. Number one is you can ask them and you usually should ask them and say, you know now that we’ve made this right, does this change your experience? And the answer is usually yes. And they say Well, would you mind amending your review truthfully you know, we’re not asking you to remove it. Would you mind adjusting your review to reflect kind of the full entirety of the experience? And 90% of the time they’ll just remove the review. And sometimes they’ll say edit you know, after you know spoke with so and so it’s such and such office then I don’t realize whatever and they took care of me blah, blah, blah, so I’m changing it to three stars, fine. You’ve accomplished what you need to accomplish. And then if they don’t change that review, but you fixed it, you can actually in your review in a generic way. Explain how you fix the situation. You know, again, start with the whole we take every interaction with our patients extremely seriously. We strive for 100% patient satisfaction. You know, we’re really, really we were so concerned to hear about this experience that we reached out to you directly. We’re so happy that we were able to resolve the situation for you. And we’re really grateful for the opportunity that you gave us to win your business back or something like that, right like that. That kind of thing. We’re not gonna go into the specifics, but we’re just you know, we resolved that like here internet we took care of it. The ones that are the hardest are the line ones and this is getting worse and worse. We’re calling this reputation 3.0 This is probably a completely different segment but what to do, if a practice becomes tiktok famous, or if you know, a person posts on some sort of social media and says, you know, this business was rude to me, you know, I want all of my friends to leave a negative review for this business.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: That happens. I mean, I’ve seen that where somebody posts a story on Tik Tok or Facebook and they felt slighted or sometimes they were slighted or they were treated unfairly. And I’m fully aware as I’m saying this and I’m only reading their side of the story is my inner business owner is like, Yeah, but there’s probably another side but, you know, I as a somebody scrolling Tik Tok, you’re like, you know, they wouldn’t serve me because whatever and you go and people are proud that they’ve flooded this company with one star reviews.

Eugene Shatsman:  Exactly. So this is this is what we call reputation management. 3.0. There’s an entire protocol for this, and I really believe that every practice needs to be ready for this type of scenario. You’ve got to have your kind of PR statement in place, you’ve got to have your you know, it’s like because usually you’re in that case, you’re usually accused of being something that’s really unfair to general humanity, right. Like, whether it’s a concern about you know, a specific treatment of minority group or something you did. That’s unfair in general, you know, whatever that looks like, you got to be ready, and you got to be ready to go for this. I don’t want to get in too much into this, Bethany because there’s, you know, probably another 40 minutes of explanation, and we do an entire training for our clients and we kind of work through, but this will happen to me. We’re all business owners. This will happen to all of us at some point, because the way social media works right now, is people follow, you know, in small cohorts and their small loyal cohorts, and they want to help each other out and they will invest the time to do this. And this happened to multiple of our clients. And so we’ve learned from experience, what to do and kind of what not to do. And you know, what our client one day I got flooded with 45 negative reviews in one day, one day, and I’m so like, what can you do? How do you dispute those? How do you manage all that stuff?

Dr.Bethany Fishbein:  We’ve seen that too from, you know, somebody lets an employee go and exactly wants to retaliate. So they get there, they post on Facebook, you know, that they were fired unfairly. And this person this sucks and do this and you should let them know and they post your link, your Google review things? Yeah, that happens.

Eugene Shatsman:  So here’s the thing. There’s three things you should do immediately if you have a review that is suspected that it’s not you know, that it was like I won’t get into the full playbook but what I will tell you is that if you have a Google review, and you know, it’s not a real review, there’s a couple things that you can do. First and foremost, you know, we write a short sentence, our short responses and customer service extremely important to our practice. You know, we verified that you are not in fact a patient of our practice. Otherwise we would reach out to you to try to resolve this issue. And we’re really disturbed by you know, some of these things that we’re hearing here. You could in addition to that, right, a little bit more of like, you know, for 22 years, we’ve been serving this community and we’ve been really proud to be inclusive of everybody blah, blah, blah, especially if it’s some sort of accusation about somebody treating being treated unfairly. So you can have kind of a boilerplate statement. And it could go on every single one of those negative reviews, especially if you’re getting a kind of a barrage or a litany of them. And those are, you know, frequently friends or whatever. You can have a boilerplate in response to some of those as we take every concern seriously, we can’t find you in our patient database. In fact, we know you’re not a patient, you know, it appears that you’re in from a different state, like you can throw in a little bit of evidence that can kind of help the reader of the negative review. Understand that, you know, there’s some something going on here. That’s a little fishy. And then on top of that, I would go report the review to Google. Now, we can all do this. Now. It’s not just so we have a little bit of superpower, as as an agency to go a little bit deeper and dispute, but you can go into your Google business profile and dispute the validity of a particular review. You can report the review, and then you can dispute it. And in fact you can have multiple people report the review. And so sometimes Google’s algorithm will just see a bunch of reports, and they’ll read your response, Google’s AI will read your response, or sometimes it’ll be transferred to a human who then gets to decide real review or not real review. And so the more information you can put in that says this is not a real review, and this is why not then you have the opportunity to kind of showcase that, hey, this should be removed. And so you can get, you know, maybe 70 to 80% of these maybe even closer to 85% removed with a high degree of certainty just doesn’t happen overnight. You can’t you know, you got 45 negative reviews today, you got to be vigilant about this. For the next like three weeks in order to get 85% of those removed over the course of the next three weeks. And then you know, and but But yeah, that’s the world we live in right now. People think they can influence a business through a variety of means and this happens to be one of them because we all now recognize how important reviews are right?

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: We had a situation once were a review said something about one of our staff members that we didn’t like we had a gentleman who worked in our office and he very frequently word nail polish and so I forget what the exact text of the review was, but it was something about the guy’s nail polish. And we just same thing we read tone into it. Is there a time where it’s appropriate to defend your practice against a review? 

Eugene Shatsman: Yeah, I think you know, so this is my, my philosophy is that, if possible, you validate and value all con.. if it sounds like hey, this is a real patient. You say we want all of our patients to have a great experience. We want all of our patients to feel positive about or whatever you need to say in order to kind of set the term and set the rules that you’re going to be empathetic and you’re going to look at the other side. Then you actually I don’t like being defensive, but I like to contrast whatever statements somebody made with our ability to serve the general community. So it’s kind of like you know, kind of calling out their crazy a little bit by saying, you know, based off of the hundreds of positive reviews that we have, and also because that that gentleman happens to be one of our patients favered opticians. We were surprised to hear that your experience was different than 90 and then everybody else who has an experience with this particular staff member and then you get into the I do want to kind of stand my ground and I want to say we’re very loyal. We we absolutely we have built our practice on employing the absolute best people who can help our patients in the best possible way. And as such, you know, we’re really grateful that we have such a great team that our team is so committed to our patients success. And that comes with having a variety of thought and a variety of personalities and and a diversity of individuals. So we are very proud of our staff, and we’re very proud of the way that our staff can serve our patients, right like this. These are generic, but powerful statements. That help tell the story of what you believe in and kind of put your practice values on the forefront in these reviews. And in the same way that you know, you can pretty much dispute any negative review without disputing it by just saying this is what we believe in. This is how we operate. This is how our business works and because of this, of this being how our business works, we’re very proud to serve our patients and all the success that we’ve had. And you’re a freakin’ weirdo because you didn’t have a good experience with us.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: I love it. We can write that right.

Eugene Shatsman: You’re a total weirdo. Yeah.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein:  Yes perfect. So you were you get into the ones that are deserved because that’s a hard topic. What happens to the category of like people who don’t understand how the stars work, and they give one star and write best experience ever?

Eugene Shatsman: Oh, yeah, that happens more and more rarely that used to be like a really big thing and like 20 Like 16 17 18 Like people would like to just push a button and then there I would just because again, what’s happening, people and I do this I’m guilty of this all the time as like when I’m going to a business and I see that they have you know 150 reviews and you know, but you know 4.5 star rating, I’ll always click lowest rating first, just to kind of quickly glance at those and that that type of review Bethany is your biggest winner, because it literally is just like a Trojan horse to distract someone from reading and any other negative review because you can just write you know, we’re so happy you had such a good experience, you know, it looks like maybe you hit the wrong button and the stars thing but we’re just so pleased to have you as a patient. We’re grateful for your feedback. You know, just kind of 

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: somebody looking to see where you screwed up finds out you actually didn’t

Eugene Shatsman:  exactly where the fair finds out that you actually didn’t that makes you look even better. 

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Alright, so we’re not perfect, and our staff is not perfect. And there’s a lot of things that are going on in the world of optometry and optical that we sometimes have no control over or sometimes do, but stuff happens and so sometimes a negative review comes in for something that it’s the truth. Like they gave us one star and in this situation, that’s probably one more than we deserve. Like we screwed up.

Eugene Shatsman: So there’s two things here. One of them is that if somebody says something like, you know, and I’ve seen this, where somebody is like, too expensive, you know, and like a one star, that’s a very different situation than what you’re describing. And they’re the ones that’s like a too expensive, you would it might be true in their perspective that it’s too expensive, but then you can really describe that and there’s maybe no way to fix that. There’s the description there is simply like, you know, we’re really proud of having you know, 900 Fashion frames on display in our in our beautiful optical part of it is we you know, we go to four different shows every single year to pick the best possible selection of frames we really believe that our patients benefit from the best materials paired with the best lenses and not frames that break every couple of months that you know, if your cat touches it, then you know they explode. What I just did there when I described that too expensive is I took a practice leverage point and I told the story and I told and explain why we may be more expensive for some patients without really defending it, but I just told the story. And so you can kind of apply that across the board, assuming that you have a customer service situation that you couldn’t resolve because remember, the first step is we call that patient and we try to make it right and let’s say that patient didn’t pick up the phone they hate you. They’ll never they’ll never deal with you again. They you know, set their phone on fire and throw away your number and like you know, you could never make it right for them, which is actually a really, really small category. So at that point we go into, okay, let’s go into you know, this was a valid situation. This is not a situation that we want to happen in our practice. And so let’s describe that for people without using specific situational indicators that can potentially violate HIPAA with that particular patient. So in this case, the formulae is validate and value, that particular patient, you know, talk about their opinions and oh, it’s really important to us. We’re so sorry to hear about your experience in our practice. That particular experience does not align with our values and that kind of thing. It also by the way, one one technique that I frequently use when somebody’s expectations didn’t meet reality is that that’s the exact line is that we’re so sorry to hear that we were not able to meet your expectations or that your your expectations with our practice, right like whatever that looks like even if their expectations are crazy. You can kind of empathize a little bit with Hey, you you had expectations they weren’t met and we are disappointed by that. But if it was a true customer service situation, you validate first, then you say you know, for over X number of years, right go back to your history. We’ve served this community, this is what we believe in and you’re hearing me say this a couple times over because it’s such an important formula for really telling your story using a negative review to tell your story and to getting by because somebody who read read that negative review needs to hear your side of the story but your side of the story may not be specific to that story. It just needs to be the value statement of your practice. So think about this as your best marketing opportunity to jump in and say, and this is what we do. Well, you know, and so this case, your expectations weren’t met and quite frankly, our expectations weren’t met, because for 20 years, we’ve been serving this community. We’ve been doing it this way. We’ve provided exceptional customer service, we’ve cared deeply about every single thing that our patients bring. And we really try to provide our patients with a lot of fantastic options to do this, this and this, the end of story, right and then you kind of reiterate that, you know, we’re really we’re really eager to make this right for you. Please reach out to us you know, we’ve tried reaching out to you please reach out to us, we’d be happy to make this right. We really don’t feel like this should have happened.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: What’s the timeline? Like if somebody’s listening to this and they’ve haven’t been replying to reviews? Do you go back on one day and say, All right, I’m answering everything for the last six months or is that kind of worse than not doing it?

Eugene Shatsman: I would go back and answer everything for the last six months. People don’t really pay attention to when you responded unless it was like within the last day but like, you know, think about this as marketing that people are reviewing six months from now a year from now two years from now. And at that point, it doesn’t really matter that you waited six months or three weeks or whatever. It just matters that you took the time and that you care about the responses that you’re putting out there.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Awesome, Eugene, this is so much incredible, valuable information to start to think about and process I’m so appreciative of all of your time to create this and not only create these episodes, but also create a list of things that I can’t wait for us to have the opportunity to talk about in the future. If you’ll join me again, anything that you wanted to say today that you didn’t get to any final thoughts that you want to get in here?

Eugene Shatsman: Oh no, I think this is just it’s a fun conversation, and because you know this is this is like the onion right? You just start peeling back the layers and the layers and like we all know reviews are important, but then when you start thinking about the consumer behavior that kind of goes beyond that. And then also every review, positive or negative is a real opportunity for your practice and just think of it that way.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Thank you so much. If somebody wants more information about what you do or wants to get a strategic plan in place for their practice, how do they reach you?

Eugene Shatsman: You know, just go to nationalstrategic.com and just you know, look me up who we’ll meet, we’ll throw a link in the episode notes and be happy to be a resource for anybody.

Dr.Bethany Fishbein: Thank you and for more information about The Power Practice, you can reach us on our site powerpractice.com Thank you so much! 

Eugene Shatsman: It’s my pleasure.

Eugene Shatsman LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eugeneshatsman/