Reviews and what the codes allow

The loop that actually works

The loop is deliberately unglamorous. Treat people well, ask once, read what comes back, reply to all of it, and change something as a result. Clinics looking for a review technique are usually looking for a way to skip the first and the last steps, and there is not one.

The step most often missing is the last. Reviews contain the clearest information a clinic will ever receive about its own service, and most of it is never acted on. A recurring complaint about waiting time or about the follow-up call is worth more than the star rating it arrived with.

Asking, once, the same way

The process should be identical for every patient. A single request, at the same point after treatment, in the same wording, through the same channel. Consistency is what makes it compliant and it is also what makes it work, because a process that depends on somebody remembering to ask stops within a month.

Timing matters. Immediately after the appointment is too early for treatments where the result develops over weeks; a request that arrives while the patient is still swollen produces a review about swelling. After the review appointment is usually right, because the patient has seen the result and has had the chance to raise anything that concerned them.

Incentives and gating

Two practices are prohibited by platform policies and both are common.

Incentives. Offering a discount, an entry into a draw, or anything else in exchange for a review is prohibited by Google's review policies and by the equivalents on other platforms. It also makes the reviews worthless as evidence, since a paid opinion is not an opinion.

Gating. Asking patients how satisfied they are and directing only the happy ones to the public review, while routing the unhappy ones to a private form, is review gating. It is prohibited, it is detectable, and it produces a rating that does not describe the clinic.

Both practices are also a problem under the advertising codes, since the resulting body of reviews misleads about the general experience of using the service. Anything presented to consumers as an authentic reflection of experience must be exactly that.

Replying, including to the bad ones

Reply to every review. The good ones briefly, without effusiveness. The poor ones carefully, and the constraint that governs everything is that you may not confirm that the person was a patient, nor discuss any aspect of their treatment, in a public reply.

The workable structure for a difficult reply is three sentences: acknowledge that the experience described is not what the clinic intends, state that you cannot discuss individual care publicly for confidentiality reasons, and give a direct route to somebody senior. Nothing else. No defence, no correction of facts, no reference to their records.

The audience for a reply to a bad review is not the reviewer. It is the next hundred people who read it, and what they are assessing is your temperament.

A defensive reply confirms the reviewer's account more effectively than the account itself. A calm, short, unarguing reply does the opposite, and it is the single highest-value paragraph a clinic owner will write all year.

Using reviews on your own site

Testimonials on your own pages are permitted within limits. Three constraints matter, all from Module 05, The rules that constrain everything you publish.

• They must be genuine, and you must hold documentary evidence that they are, and be able to produce it.
• They do not substantiate objective claims. A patient saying a result lasted two years does not establish that the treatment lasts two years.
• Selecting only the most favourable in a way that misleads about the general experience is a problem in itself.

On the technical side, review structured data has its own strict rules and marking up ratings that are not displayed on the page, or that were aggregated from elsewhere, is the breach discussed in Module 14, Structured data for treatment pages.

What to do about an unfair review

First, reply calmly using the structure above. Second, if the review breaches the platform's policies, for example because it is not from a patient, contains abuse, or reveals third-party information, report it through the platform's process and wait.

What not to do: ask the patient to remove it in exchange for anything, respond publicly with clinical detail, or attempt to bury it with a burst of solicited reviews. The first is likely to be a breach and looks worse than the review, the second is a confidentiality problem with professional consequences, and the third is a detectable pattern.

A single poor review among many considered ones does very little harm, and a body of reviews with no poor ones at all reads as managed. Readers are more sophisticated about this than clinics assume.