In recent years, the reputation of a medical clinic has emerged as the critical factor in a clinic’s success.

According to a recent GCR survey of over 1000 medical clinics worldwide, increasing the clinic’s reputation is the top investment priority in 2017, outranking renovations to the clinic, marketing, staff training and technology.

But not every clinic is clear on the best approach to managing it’s reputation.

To help you stay focused, here are 10 essential steps to managing your medical clinic’s reputation by using the GCR Score:

1. Understand the importance of your clinic’s reputation

Managing a clinic’s reputation is the process of monitoring, managing and acting on the overall apparent quality of the clinic and using it to drive patient satisfaction, clinic improvements and attracting more and better new patients. As more patients turn to the internet as part of choosing a new clinic, a good GCR Score is a great measurement of how patients see your clinic when they review it online.

2. Set clinic reputation objectives and strategies

Set a vision of what you want patients to say about your clinic after they leave. Analyze your GCR Score and rankings on key review sites, and decide where you should be (objectives) and how you will get there (strategies).

3. Involve the whole clinic team

Share your reputation vision, objectives and strategies with staff, and ensure that they understand their role in fulfilling them.

4. Prepare your clinic

The most important part of a clinic’s reputation takes place at the clinic. Put a social media policy and guidelines in place to ensure that employees know where they stand and understand the risks of mistreating patients. Train and empower staff to exceed patient expectations and prevent in-clinic issues from escalating to online negative reviews.

5. Optimize your clinics online presence

Claim and update your profiles on key review sources like Facebook, Google Business, Yelp and online clinic portals. Add descriptions, imagery and contact information, and ensure content is kept accurate and current over time.

6. Set up review monitoring tools

With so much chatter in social media, it’s virtually impossible to keep up. To ensure that you don’t miss a thing, set up alerts on review sites and social networks to be notified of reviews and mentions of your clinic. Appoint a person to monitor reviews and distribute them to appropriate team members. A review management tool like the one provided by the GCR makes it easy by having all your clinic reviews in one place, and you overall clinic review scores updated daily.

7. Analyze patient feedback

Pay close attention to comments in reviews and look for patterns that need attention as well as strengths to leverage in marketing communications as key differentiators from other clinics. Combine feedback in patients reviews online with feedback in surveys that you conduct in the clinic to get a 360-degree view of patient satisfaction.

8. Take action

Share feedback with staff and use it as a constructive learning tool. Review policies and procedures, taking the actions necessary to fix problems, to prevent complaints from recurring, and to generate a steady stream of positive reviews.

9. Recognize and reward

Provide your team members with regular updates on increases to the clinics GCR Score & Ranking, by using the GCR benchmarking reports. Incentivize and reward staff and managers for achieving objectives, recognize them for positive feedback, and celebrate your successes.

10. Respond to patient reviews

Responding is an opportunity to show that you’re listening and you care about patient feedback, to change perceptions and to reassure prospective patients. Prioritize reviews that call for an apology, a clarification or a show of gratitude. Thank the patient, apologize if something went wrong, and say how you’re following up.

Integrate these steps into the daily operations and culture of your clinic, and you will increase patient satisfaction, earn better reviews and attract more patients, thereby helping to ensure the long-term success for your clinic.

The GCR can help clinics at every step of the clinic reputation management process. We aggregate the data of over 419,000 medical clinics worldwide who use the Global Clinic Rating to benchmark performance, and help you to analyze your clinic and identify opportunities to increase patient satisfaction and stay ahead of medical clinic trends.