Reputation Management

Online Reviews Can Help Your Business Offline, Too

June 7, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Offline Reputation Management Matters

Put action into your customers’ insights.

By now you’ve learned that managing your online reputation is important, and that the most beneficial way to do so is through earning online reviews from your customers.

Although it is great to have a good reputation and earn new customers through your positive review presence, what are some other actionable ways that you can use customers’ reviews?

Online reviews do not only have to stay confined to the internet – they can be brought to life by aiding in your internal and operational day-to-day to better your business.

Gathering feedback from your audience through online reviews helps you gain insight from their experience.

Use Customer Feedback to Improve

Feedback from online reviews helps your business, product(s), and/or customer experience improve due to the reactions and suggestions received.

How? (Tip: We’ve put together the ultimate guide for reputation management you can get here).

Well, reviews don’t only exist as customer opinions for others to learn about your business – they also serve as feedback from customers for you to take into serious consideration. Of course, you want to do more of what they say you are doing well, and take note of areas for improvement.

Your reviews inevitably won’t all be entirely positive, so make sure to notice the less-than-favorable or suggested enhancements from customer experiences.

As long as you have someone assigned to regularly be checking your new online reviews or – even better – an aggregate online review system, then you can stay on top of what consumers are saying about your business. From here, keep track of improvement suggestions to implement in your products or internal processes.

Do you need a review platform to help you manage your online reviews?
Talk to a CallSource representative for our solution today.

Competitive Benchmarking

Next, look at some competitive benchmarking. By viewing online reviews of your competition, you will learn what you can do that your competitors can’t or what you do better than they do and vice-versa.

Determine if any improvements or processes can be improved by what your peers are doing. Do customers seem to comment on one aspect of their business that they really like that you can implement on your end? Maybe you should start doing something similar! Do they seem to lack in customer service but you know that is the bread-and-butter of what makes people choose you over them? Continue to work on staying great in that area of your business.

Do you have an offline feedback tool or a way to get customers to submit feedback?

Online reviews can be created from links, QR codes, and thank you cards so you can collect responses.

Receive Even More Positive Reviews

Once you start using your online reviews to make improvements, you should gain more positive online reviews simply from making your business better and listening to customer feedback.

Update customers who left reviews suggesting (or complaining) about a particular aspect of your business when you implement changes so they, and the rest of your audience, see that you are listening and improving thanks to your customers.

This not only shows that you actually take time to read reviews but listen to them and take action as well. And you are now a more trustworthy, personable and great business for doing so.

Before you can implement necessary changes to complaints, you’ll need to address the unhappy customer. Need help responding to negative reviews? Download our free step-by-step guide here.

Healthcare Professionals Need Online Reviews, Too [Infographic]

May 30, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Experience in the industry isn’t the only thing that matters now to be successful – you need a great reputation both online and offline, too.

It may be easy to assume that because healthcare is a necessity in society, that patients will always be coming to your office as long as you cover their insurance, are in close proximity, or provide something that they need.

But that is not the case.

Just like with any other business, online reviews are still becoming important in the healthcare sphere as well. In fact, a recent survey showed that almost half of patients would choose an out-of-network provider that had better reviews.

Software Advice recently surveyed over 2,000 U.S. patients to determine how patients use online reviews for physicians. Some of the most key findings from this survey are in the infographic below.

Google’s Changes for Online Reviews and What it Means for Your Business

May 29, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Make sure your review strategy keeps up with Google’s rules.

If you have been paying attention to what I’ve been drilling into your mind on our blog, then you know that one thing you must pay attention to as a business decision maker is your online review presence.

With such, you, of course, must take the bad with the good, and that may include getting negative reviews from customers from time to time. Google realizes that businesses do not want to receive negative feedback and that some may even take measures to prohibit or hide negative reviews. Because of this, they’ve updated their review terms.

While these updates shouldn’t have a huge impact on how you’re already gathering and receiving online reviews, below are some of Google’s terms for online reviews and a few things to note about them when it comes to your online review strategy.

Don’t use reviews for advertising purposes. This includes, but is not limited to, posting email addresses, phone numbers, social media links, or links to other websites in your reviews.

This one may go without saying and may be more relevant to the reviewer rather than your business review page, but reviews cannot have a dual purpose of trying to advertise back to something else. The content should purely be about the business being reviewed and not include links or anything about another site or business.

Don’t discourage or prohibit negative reviews or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers.

No one wants to receive a bad review – but you cannot explicitly ask for positive reviews or blatantly discourage negative reviews. This means that you can ask for customers to leave reviews, but none of the language in your ask can explicitly say what type of feedback you want customers to leave.

Basically, do not ask customers to leave positive reviews, and do not prohibit or gate possible negative reviews. Simply ask, and you shall receive what the customer’s opinion of your business and services or products is organically.

If you do happen to receive a negative review, be sure to reply to the reviewer’s comments in these simple steps.

Don’t include promotional or commercial content.

This rule relates back to #1 – the person leaving a review cannot link back or use the review for any promotional content. The review text has to be a review.

Don’t offer or accept money in exchange for reviews.

While you want to try to ask customers for reviews in a proactive way, you should never exchange reviews for money or gifts. You especially should never offer money in exchange for positive reviews either – as that goes against two of Google’s policies and is just not a good, honest practice.

Don’t solicit reviews from customers in bulk.

While you should always ask customers for reviews whenever you do business with them, be sure not to do some huge undertaking of trying to get tons of reviews in a small period of time. Stay consistent with gathering reviews rather than getting as many as possible at once.

While this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try gathering reviews with internal contests or still asking every customer even during a busy period, just take notice of the number of reviews you look to gain in any certain period.

Bottom line – make sure your company is being honest and trustworthy when asking for reviews and how they are being posted by your consumers. And if you do happen to receive a negative review, just follow these easy steps to respond to the review and resolve the situation to possibly turn bad into good.

Millennial Customers Are Moving the Car Buying Process Online [Infographic]

May 17, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

While it’s still true that the majority of car purchases are made in person at the dealership, much of the actual process leading up to the sale has shifted to the internet.

Most millennials (people born between 1981 and 1997) are old enough to be purchasing cars now – and they’ve helped change up the game when it comes to car buying.

So the question now remains – how can you accommodate this new car buy process at your dealership? Take a look at our infographic below for some great tips and stats!

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Why Your Dental Practice Needs Call Tracking

May 11, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Start implementing call tracking metrics into your practice ASAP to improve its success.

As a dentist, you have far more things to worry about in your office than marketing and employee performance

Like – caring for your patients and looking into 30+ mouths a day, for one thing.

I’m sure that you can still agree that marketing success and performance management are imperative areas for your practice’s success.
This is where utilizing call tracking services come in handy to serve and partner with your practice.

So what exactly is the value of using call tracking for your dental office?

I’m glad you asked.

Improve your marketing spend

One of the easiest and most straight-forward reasons that people and businesses invest in call tracking is to ensure that they are spending their marketing dollars wisely.

By using unique tracking numbers on each of your different marketing pieces (website, direct mail, newspaper ads, etc.), you can easily view which campaigns are receiving the most phone calls, leads, and appointments. By investing more dollars into the marketing sources that are working, and less (or zero) into ones that aren’t, you will improve your spend without wasting precious marketing dollars.

Be “in the know” of the front office’s new patient phone call handling

When you’re busy running from room to room to work on patient’s oral surgeries, check on patient’s teeth during their regular appointments with the dental hygienists, and much more – you don’t have much free time to check in with your front office staff to see if their work performance is up to par with what your practice requires.

With call tracking, you don’t only have access to view your marketing campaigns’ success, but your employees’ success as well. You can view front office staff’s appointment conversion rates, see what times of day you are getting the most calls, and who is most successful on the phone – as well as listen to audio recordings to really learn how employees sound on the phone with your current and potential patients.

Use call recordings for employee feedback, engagement, and training

So you now have the ability to know what is going on up front while you’re working with patients – now what?

How can you use these call recordings and call tracking reports to help your practice?

When you’re able to listen back to your front office staff’s phone calls with new and returning patients, you can actually use them for internal improvement.

Have gatherings with your staff to go over what they are doing well or what they should be doing differently on the phone, and utilize the call recordings and reports in annual reviews and regular team or one-on-one meetings.

Improve front office staff phone skills with call coaching

Depending on your call tracking service, you can implement your own internal call coaching for the phone handlers, or with a company like CallSource, you can utilize third-party call coaching to supplement your team.

You’ve analyzed what’s going on. Now the second part is call coaching (or the actionable side of this equation) to correct and improve any opportunities over the phone. Much like Newton’s First Law of Motion: An object will remain at rest, or uniform motion in a straight line until acted upon by an external force. Without a call tracking and coaching provider, the practice will continue to improve, remain the same, or decrease at the same rate until acted upon by an outside force.

Take hold of your online reputation

You may not think of “online reputation” when you hear of call tracking services, but a full-service company will assist you in bettering all aspects of your business.

By using an online review platform that aggregates all of your online reviews in one space and easily lets you request reviews and reply to submitted reviews, you can stay on top of your online reputation.

Why is this important?

When someone is choosing a new practice, whether it be for their or their children’s dental needs, orthodontic needs, or oral surgery, they will want to be sure that who they are choosing is trustworthy, reliable, and good at what they do. One way that people are finding this out now more than ever is on the internet – through online reviews.

Ready to take your dental practice to the next level with CallSource call tracking, performance and reputation management? Contact one of our representatives today to learn more.

How to Properly Establish Business Goals with Call Tracking: Pt. 2

May 1, 2018 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

You can’t reach greatness without established goals to reach.

If you don’t know by now, CallSource really believes in the power of goal setting and achieving.

To be the best of the best, it is important to set goals. You must always have something to strive for.

We already went through the first 3 steps of goal-setting; now we are at part 2 to finish up how you can properly set goals with employees to help your business progress positively.

Here are the 6 steps again:

Determine goals based on business objectives
Set specific goals
Develop a timeline for accomplishing each goal
Communicate goals to each team member
Create accountability through regular monitoring and employee feedback
Practice continuous improvement

Now let’s finish it up!

“Creating a consultative sales culture and a culture of accountability has helped many CallSource clients reach their performance goals.”

Culture Shift

Recreating your business culture may be necessary to achieve your goals. Your exact circumstances may require significant alteration to how you manage your team or no change at all. Only you as the business’ leader can decide. But conducting a careful analysis of what will be needed to reach your goals is a good place to start. Here are some questions to ask:

Are my team members invested in the success of the business?
Are my team members motivated to stretch and achieve new levels of success?
Do my call handlers know their role in the sales cycle is to set appointments?
Can my team members correctly answer what their goals are?
Can my team members correctly answer what the company goals are?
If a team member falls short of their goals, are there specific steps that will be taken?

If “No” is often the answer to these questions, meeting your goals may require a shift in culture. Cultural shifts do not need to be frightening or painful for your team. Nor does it require you to shed what makes your business a fun and rewarding place to work. Understanding the nature of the change, setting clear goals and expectations, and communicating effectively with your team will create a smooth process.

Creating a consultative sales culture and a culture of accountability has helped many CallSource clients reach their performance goals.

Creating a consultative sales culture simply means that call handlers understand that their role is to set appointments for qualified prospects. This means, making an effort to understand the caller’s needs, building value and asking for the appointment.

A culture of accountability is not designed for the sole purpose of punishing poor performers. Strong performers will benefit, as their efforts will shine through and be recognized. Each team member will understand his or her role and how that role impacts the success of the organization. Standards and goals will be defined, and each person will work to achieve those goals. Those who are falling short will accept the need for additional coaching and training and make an effort to learn.

Implement Ongoing Check-ins

To make sure you are achieving your goals, plan on holding regular “check-ins” with staff. These might be daily, weekly, or monthly.

Choose what best suits your business, and communicate the schedule of the check-ins with your employees as well.

Check-ins can be included in your action plan and given to call handlers ahead of time. This will hold them accountable so that they will be continuously working towards improvement.

By checking in, whether these might be held as a team meeting, individual meetings, or looking at reports weekly, or a mix of all of these, make sure there is a system in place to keep your goals in check and on track.

Keep Aiming Towards New Goals

Once you have hit your goals, make sure to keep aiming to be better or stay the best. Your goal may be a continued improvement or maintain consistency. No matter the case, always have a goal in mind and make sure to relay these to your employees. Post them somewhere, hold ongoing meetings, and stay on top of the progress. Once you have achieved your major goals, you are on the path to stay at the top.

Never become complacent. By continuously setting goals you will become as successful as possible.
How do you set goals and track your progress? Drop us a comment below!