Online reviews are an important part of getting new clients, especially as a healthcare practice. More than 77% of patients use online reviews as their first step in finding a new doctor, according to recent research from SoftwareAdvice.

The same survey found that 90% of respondents use online reviews to evaluate physicians. Another study from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that 59% of consumers say physician rating sites are “somewhat” or “very” important.

While client reviews help gain new patients, they can also pose a problem if you get complaints. Unfortunately, you won’t always have glowing reviews. But you don’t want the negative feedback to scare others away.

If this is the case, don’t lose all hope. Responding to negative reviews can still build trust. Around 80% of survey respondents said that it would increase their trust if a company responded to negative customer comments.

But the way that you respond to these complaints can make all the difference. If you stay professional in your responses and show that you take patient concerns seriously, you can still win over clients.

With that said, here are ten tips to keep in mind for how not to respond to patient complaints.

Don't Be Confrontational

The first thing you want to avoid doing when responding to patient complaints is becoming confrontational. You might have the urge to do this in the heat of the moment, but it will backfire on your organization later.

If you look aggressive on a public platform, people definitely won’t trust that you’ll have patience when dealing with them in private during a visit.

Getting confrontational with someone who had a bad experience will just make them think less of your practice. This will cause them to switch practices, as well as drive prospective clients away.

Don't Get Defensive

Similarly, you should never become defensive. Naturally, you’ll want to defend yourself, especially if someone seems to be attacking your practice over something that isn’t true.

But getting defensive makes it seem like you’re dismissing the patient’s experience. Even if you think the person is wrong about the type of service you provided, it doesn’t help to express that. Both the patient and viewers will think that you don’t care to solve the situation.

Instead, acknowledge their concerns. Their review could be out of context anyway so you don’t know what exactly happened to make them feel so dissatisfied.

If you need more details to understand their complaint, you can ask them to contact you so you can get more information. This makes it look like you acknowledge there could have been an issue, and you’re open to understanding their side.

Don't Take the Complaint Lightly

Just as you shouldn’t get over-emotional about their negative feedback, you also shouldn’t respond too lightly. This again makes it look like you aren’t taking their experiences seriously.

They were upset enough if they posted about the situation online. This means you need to be just as serious about the complaint. Don’t make jokes or brush off the problem.

An unprofessional comment could also appear against you if the patient were to file a legal claim against your organization. Hopefully, the issue wasn’t that concerning that you’d end up in court. But if for some reason it does, then you wouldn’t want your response on a review to backfire by getting used against you.

Don't Dismiss Their Concerns

Using the poor response behaviors that I already mentioned would seem emotionally dismissive to the person who posted the complaint. But you also shouldn’t ignore it altogether.

If people weren’t looking for a response from you, then they wouldn’t post a negative review. They want something to change so taking the time to reply shows that you recognize this. Of course, you still want to follow the above tips so that you don’t seem aggressive or like you don’t care.

Instead, responding in the first place and with an understanding attitude shows that you’re trying to resolve the problem.

Don't Write a Complicated Response

Many people don’t understand technical medical terms, since 47% of adults lack intermediate health literacy. If you write a response loaded with this medical terminology, people won’t understand what you’re talking about.

They may also feel like you’re talking down to them, trying to correct their concern by showing off how smart you are. Of course, you do want to prove yourself as credible with your knowledge. But sounding too advanced won’t help the situation if they can’t decipher what you’re saying.

Patients will appreciate a response in plain language that they understand. They won’t end up confused, which would just give them something else to complain about.

Don't Delete Complaints

In most cases, you shouldn’t delete reviews. This makes it seem like you’re hiding the real experiences that people have at your practice. It makes you appear dishonest and like you don’t want people to know the truth.

People are also less likely to trust a business with only positive reviews. They’ll think that the company is censoring or posting fake comments. 95% of consumers say they’d lose trust in a company that deleted reviews.

Although in some situations, it is acceptable to delete online complaints. Posts that contain profanity, slander, threats, or other offensive content should get removed from public forums. Most rating platforms such as Google Review, Yelp, and Facebook have guidelines that forbid this kind of language.

You can report and flag these posts on the platform so they’ll get removed. You can even reply to the poster reminding them of the guidelines and ask them to edit or remove the inappropriate language.

Don't Alter Content

Altering content is just as bad as deleting the complaints. Again, people lose trust when businesses aren’t honest with the reviews they receive. Altering them affects your credibility because the poster will know that it isn’t what they originally said.

They could then lash out online to inform other viewers that your business isn’t truthful. This censorship would again lead people to lose faith in your practice if you’re trying to hide negative experiences.

If you think that someone’s complaint does need editing before others view it online, reach out to that patient. For instance, if it violates the platform’s guidelines like I already mentioned, you can ask them to edit it before it gets removed.

Don't Acknowledge or Repeat PHI

In other cases, a review might contain protected health information that you can’t address within a response. Acknowledging or repeating this PHI online would violate HIPAA if you didn’t first receive authorized consent to discuss it.

This makes it difficult to properly respond to a complaint. You don’t want to just ignore them since that would look like you don’t care. But you also don’t want to cause an unintentional HIPAA violation. In these instances, reach out to the patient about editing their review so that you don’t need to address their PHI. Alternatively, you can leave a comment asking the person to contact you privately so that you can discuss it in more detail.

Don't Reference Staff Performance

It’s also inappropriate to reference staff performance. Sometimes a patient might complain about an employee or a situation that resulted from the employee’s actions.

It can be tempting to throw that staff member under the bus to save face for the rest of your practice. But this will backfire. Engaging in negative comments about your staff would also make them lose trust in the company.

It also looks bad to clients if you’re talking badly about staff, even if they were the result of a poor experience. If someone complains about staff, simply acknowledge the situation, plan to investigate it, and will handle it as you see necessary.

That way, you don’t disclose too much about the employee but you still show clients that you’ll address the problem.

Some of the tips I already gave rely on you to follow up with the patient. Whether it’s to get more details about the experience or to discuss PHI, there are often interactions that need to happen away from a public platform.

However, you need to still be cautious about how you contact these people. Discussing PHI through email also poses security risks, so you shouldn’t contact a patient this way about their information unless you have consent.

And if you ask them to contact you through email, make sure you first explain any security concerns if they share PHI this way.

Conclusion

No one wants their clients to complain about their practice. That’s pretty obvious; why would you? It could drive other customers away since they often look at reviews before choosing a practice. Negative comments about a practice could also be embarrassing for the employees who work there. It could make them look bad if people assume they were involved in a negative experience.

Yet it’s impossible to prevent these complaints. No matter how much you focus on patient satisfaction, there will always be at least one unhappy customer. You can’t control every interaction.

So when you do encounter negative feedback, you need to be ready with how you’ll handle it. The first step is to respond in general. If someone was so upset that they took the time to leave a complaint, then they’re relying on you to address and correct it.

Knowing how not to respond to patient complaints will guide you as you resolve the situation. By following these steps, you can prevent even more blowback that would further hurt your reputation and lose clients.