Dear VNN Member: 

It's getting cold and snowy across a lot of the country...are your pets ready?  How about your clients' pets?  

We also want to remind you that a good portion of our membership have renewal dates upcoming in the next 60 days.  If you want to know when your membership is due, log in to MyVNN.com and click the My Profile tab.  Your anniversary date is listed at the bottom.  If you are within 45 days of your membership anniversary date, you will see links and instructions about renewing.   As always, we are happy to answer any questions you might have. 

Handling Complaints and Protecting Your Reputation, Part 2 

James P. Humphries, BS, DVM, CVJ
Veterinary News Network
www.MyVNN.com

American Society of Veterinary Journalists
www.ASVJ.org   

Just type in your name, or your hospital's name, into Google and all sorts of stuff shows up.  Some good, some bad and maybe some really awful!  In this world of universal, instant and fairly anonymous communications using the Internet and especially social media, both good and bad things can happen.  The good, of course, includes much greater reach to potential clients, existing clients and very inexpensive marketing and professional education.  The visual nature of the Internet also makes photos and video an outstanding way to tell your story and allow you to stand out.

Unfortunately, some people, fairly or not, will use this medium to complain about your service or facility to the same huge audience.  On your business site or social media pages you have good control, and this is fairly easy to contain.  But on other large commercial ratings sites such as Yelp, City Search or Yahoo Local it appears you have little control and are at the mercy of some unreasonable people.  When one angry client decides to exact revenge against your hospital they can appear to have the upper hand and lots of undeserved control.  Its a scary prospect for a business owner.  

Instead of being scared, businesses should view the Internet as a tool to work directly with upset clients, if possible, fix the issue and hopefully turn them into a loyal client.  The best way to handle online complaints is to use social media to nip them in the bud!  A recent survey showed a third of all businesses offered no response to angry customers.  That is the wrong approach.  Of the businesses that did contact an angry customer online 18% of the customers were so happy with the follow-up that they converted to regular customers and even referred new business.  A third of them went on to post positive reviews of the business and how they were so well handled.  Another third went so far as to delete their damaging posts.  

So it seems your first step is to contact the people via the social media or even by phone, discuss the problem and offer a solution.  This will yield positive results for that person and the thousands watching, because online reviews live forever and that can be a good thing.  

This also means you need to do this quickly.  Reviews that are months or even years old (because you did not know they were there) have done their damage and your repair will seem like too little too late and have little effect.  

Listening:

Therefore you should be "listening" to the net every day.  Set up Google Alerts using your name and hospital name as key words and get daily emails sent to you by Google's service.  Backtype.com will also send you daily email alerts.  Other listening tools are; Technorati (http://technorati.com/), Trackle (http://trackle.com/search/), and SocialMention (http://www.socialmention.com/) and Twitter!  Tom is always available to help you set these listening tools up - very important. (TomDock@MyVNN.com)

Respond Quickly:

Then, once you discover a problem, it's simply a matter of researching the case and using some good, old-fashioned client service to resolve the problem and make them happy.
Does this work?  USA TODAY reports that more than half of all Fortune 100 companies now use social media to solve customer complaints. Because they see companies that respond to online criticism quickly and strongly - get results.

Most veterinary hospitals do not receive many aggressive complaints so it usually doesn't take much of your time to correct.  However, when choosing rants to respond to, look for ones that are less than a few days old, on prominent sites and are about problems that you can solve. Those that appear to be the same person under different "names" ranting about the same case or close together in time will be obvious (both to you and to others) that they are mounting an unreasonable personal assault and they lose credibility.  When this type of thing appears on your Facebook page, immediately post your Facebook rules, then delete and block them.  Do not hesitate, state your policy and then delete.  (A general Facebook posting policy for VNN members is available here).

When defending your hospital online, do so as the hospital and in a proud honest way.  Talk about your professionalism, your service and the pride you have in what you offer.  Of course I would not get into the details of a case.  Keep online responses polite and direct then ask the client if you can contact them directly by e-mail or phone to discuss the specific details of their complaint.

This is known as "taking the issue off-line" and many times get a resolution that will benefit all of you.  Once resolved I'd even ask them directly to remove the damaging remarks.  Following up with them in a few days or weeks can really show you are sincere about the resolution.

On the flip side of this, when you know you have a very satisfied client, why not hand them a prepared detail sheet showing them how to go online and give you a positive review?  Perhaps offer a small gift (like a Starbucks gift certificate) for doing so.  This could pay you huge benefits.  

Sometimes there is no correction for a person who won't have resolution and simply wants to try to damage you.  So there are times a when you can only offer a sincere apology and walk away from the conversation. Thinking of a legal action against them for slander or malicious intent will be a waste of time as proof of damages is practically impossible.

 
Reputation Management:

This is a new and fast growing industry.  Because consumers are so free to voice opinions, many of which are unjust and malicious, companies such as Reputation.com, Reputationmanagementconsultants.com, and Ironreputation.com.  All have for fee services that will help you deal with this growing problem.  Today any public figure has to use such services because we are so divided and polarized in this country that no matter your position, someone is going to attack you - especially online.  Consequently, this new industry has come to the rescue.  

However, I have made a connection with an expert in this area and he has agreed to help me write a part three and four to this series as the topic has quickly become complex.  I'd like to boil this down for you in practical steps you can take when needed.  

For now let me give you Step 1 in this process.  Each online review site has an option for the business owner to "claim" ownership of the business.  You must do this otherwise things are being posted without your control or response.  In claiming ownership you can place your comments next to each review.  The key is to respond to the review in a timely, professional and respectful manner.  Some business owners may want to use this method of posting as a way to get revenge and may slander the reviewer.  Resist this temptation and remember the goal is to diffuse the reviewer and provide positive feedback in the giant cloud of keywords surrounding your practice.

Remember all of these postings live forever on the net and they all contains "words" - or -  "key words" that search engines find and offer up in search results.  So take this important first step now.  

As you may remember in 2010 Yelp was hit with several law suits because of the unscrupulous practice of calling business owners with offers to "make bad reviews go away" for a fee (advertising).  Several veterinary practices were involved. They did stop this bad practice (and frankly have a bit of reputation management to do for themselves).  So don't be afraid of Yelp, they are powerful and are responsible for much of your reputation.  So taking this step of claiming your business there, and on Google and Yahoo review sites, is essential.  It will give you a voice where you may have none right now.  

Part three of this series will discuss the more detailed steps of creating internet tools to help the key word "cloud" and assist you in pushing these malicious or ranting review sites down off page one of Google search results.  

Finally, in part 4, we'll give you more details on how to take other actions if you are unable to push the bad reviews down and keep all positive on the first page of Google's "organic" rankings.  It can be done, but it does require knowing the tricks and some time for implementation.  It may also take the assistance of an SEO firm for very specialized keyword work and I'll give you some referrals for that as well.  

Please find attached a generic Facebook Posting Policy we have constructed for you.  Please feel free to use it as is, or modify in any way.  Post it on your FB page, and then as needed do not be shy about deleting posters that abuse the right to say something on your page.  

Till then...

Dr.Jim@MyVNN.com
719-495-2100  

Thomas Dock, CVJ
Managing Editor

tomdock@MyVNN.com

719-445-7065 

Dr. Jim Humphries

President/News Director

dr.jim@MyVNN.com

719-495-2100

PetDocsOnCall is Changing.  Introducing VetNewsOnline!   

TEXT MSG SERVICE!