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The Positive of Negative Reviews

Date Posted: 04.21.21 Author: Nate Hurst
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As a proud integration partner of Cloud 9, Swell is excited to help you improve your patient communications and also generate new reviews for your practices. Hopefully, a lot of positive reviews, but it’s possible that some negative reviews creep in along the way as well. Nobody’s perfect. Here’s why that shouldn’t stop you from pushing forward.

Negative online reviews hurt, no doubt. They can hurt our practices and can even hurt personally. We hate being told where we fall short. It’s human nature. Can you imagine if we were judged and reviewed on our worst moments in regular life? AND they were made public?

“Hey, this one time, when you were 14 you said some not so nice things and therefore I can never trust you again. 2.5 stars. Would not recommend as a friend.”

For many of us, that’s what negative online reviews of our practices can feel like — personal shots — “How could they say that about me/us!?” But in reality it’s almost never personal. Admittedly, it’s tough to do, but what if we were able to look at negative reviews as opportunities to get better?

If 14 year old us never learned from our mistakes, how far would we have gotten in life?

Looking back, of course 14 year old us would have done a few things differently, but whatever those mistakes and shortcomings were, they certainly don’t define who we are today (if they do, there’s likely a better blog for you than this one). Nor do a handful of negative reviews have to define our business. Learn from mistakes, improve, and then bury those negative reviews with newer, positive reviews.

According to some researchers a few negative reviews are actually a good thing and can build trust with future customers. On top of that, they don’t have to last forever. By generating more and more positive reviews, the negative reviews “disappear” (get hidden below new positive reviews) and now you can focus on fixing the issues that caused the bad review in the first place. On average, Swell helps customers generate 20+ new reviews in just the first month.

Ok, so learning from the negative reviews is a positive takeaway, but wouldn’t it be better if we knew where to improve without a negative post? Short answer, yes. Longer answer, it’s possible with Swell Survey.

Swell Survey allows you to send simple, automated surveys to your customers via text or email, to get real, honest feedback, and use said feedback to improve your business—whether it’s your facilities, product offerings, or employee training. You can customize both your questions and your recipient groups, or send standard benchmark surveys. Text surveys are so simple that customers will actually do it.

Improvement before a negative review has a chance to get posted. Crazy concept.

About the Author Nate Hurst

Nate Hust is the Sr. Director of Marketing at Swell CX. To learn more about the easiest tools for growing your local business, visit https://www.swellcx.com/