Our family does a LOT of our shopping on Amazon (including many of our grocery purchases through Amazon Fresh).
Pretty sure we’re partially responsible for keeping Amazon in business. If you have Amazon Prime, maybe you feel the same way.
Recently, my nice coffee grinder that I’ve had for years… finally bit the dust.
So my wife, Susan, naturally turned to Amazon to replace it.
She ordered one that had good reviews, seemed to be high quality, and a good price.
After a few rounds in the kitchen, sure it gets the job done. But it has one major-ish issue – the coffee has trouble feeding down from the hopper into the grinder.
So I have to sit there and shake/move the grinder the whole time, just to keep the coffee grinding. A minor inconvenience, but an inconvenience nonetheless. The thing has one job, and it doesn’t do that job well.
Susan feels it is her civic duty to leave honest reviews on products. So she commented on this issue in a 3-star review she left on Amazon.
And then she received an email from the distributor…
The email started like a typical customer service reply for a review like this – Hey thanks for your feedback, we’re sorry to hear about the inconvenience…
So we are willing to give you a full refund, and you can keep the product, if you’ll just change your review to 5-star.
Wow.
They literally said, “You can even leave exactly what you wrote, just change the star rating from a 3-star to a 5-star.”
Well, Susan didn’t respond to this. And 2 days later, she received a follow-up.
“Hey, just making sure you received our offer. Would you change the review to 5-star and we’ll refund you?”
So why am I telling you about this weird Amazon coffee grinder review situation?
This real-world example shows why 5-star online reviews are so vital in modern society.
Amazon sellers know they live and die by reviews. Reviews affect their ranking in search results, as well as (obviously) their sales.
5-star reviews are so important that Amazon sellers are willing to give away money just to keep negative reviews off their listings.
Most of the people who read this aren’t selling on Amazon. But you are selling treatments. And 5-star reviews are essential to your success in 2020 and beyond.
Google, Healthgrades, Rate.MD, even Yelp (yes, I hate Yelp, too) – you need 5-star reviews everywhere.
I saw a stat that 8 out of 10 people consider online reviews with the same level of influence as a direct referral from a friend or family member.
That sounds a little crazy to me, until I think of all the times I use reviews to make decisions – where to eat, where to shop, what to buy, who to trust. It’s a daily thing for me. Probably you too.
Your prospects and patients are the same way. They look at reviews. They trust reviews. They act based on what they see in reviews.
So for practices who have very few reviews…. or 1 new review every 2-3 months…. or an even mix of good reviews and bad ones… this sends up a red flag for your prospects.
Every happy patient who has treatment with you can be a new evangelist for your practice. And part of that is engaging them – asking them – to leave a review for you. And creating an easy mechanism for them to do so.
That’s the system you need. And if you don’t have one, reply to this email, and we’ll get you sorted out.
I was on a call with a practice earlier this week, and we were discussing the effectiveness of a customized review system we built for them (averaging 30-40 new 5-star reviews each month. They now get more 5-star reviews each month than they were getting annually before we started working together).
The surgeon said, “I want to thank you. I see patients every day who tell me they saw our reviews, and that’s a big reason why they came here.”
Take your reviews as seriously as the Amazon coffee grinder people, and you’ll set yourself up for practice growth.
– Troy
PS – What I DON’T recommend is bribing people to remove or change a review. If you get a bad review, first thing is to contact the reviewer and solve their problem.
And once you make it right, you can ask them to update their review to reflect the new circumstances.
Amazon Coffee Grinder Co didn’t do this. They tried to pay us to lie. Insulting. Frustrating. Don’t do this.
PPS – And in case you were wondering, Susan did not accept the bribery offer to change her review. The Truth Prevails…