As you may know, Profitdiagnostix have been sending out customer review requests for practices for over 8 months now and are starting to get enough data to demystify the challenges, truths and lies about reviews on Facebook and Google reviews.
The current economy lends itself to businesses needing to spend more to keep clients visiting – knowing where to spend more money on marketing is important.
How have we collected at this data?
If a pet owner visits a practice using Profitdiagnostix Reviews for a consultation (excluding euthanasia), repeat consultation or vaccination they are automatically sent a request to review the experience using a text message 24 hours later. Customers are sent at most one request every 6 months, so if they visit frequently in a short period, they only get sent one request.
They then complete a private/internal review using their mobile phone which takes about 30 seconds – this private review is visible to the practice only. The format of the review is very simple – they click on 1-5 stars and then are allowed to type in any comments. The customer is given the option to post a public review on Facebook or Google.
So how many customers actually leave a review?
In the veterinary sector, when review requests are sent via text, 15% of clients complete an internal review. Of those, only about 10% go on to leave a public review on Google or Facebook—most choose Google. For every 100 requests sent, expect roughly 15 internal reviews and just 1–2 public reviews, highlighting the significant value of each 5-star review received.
Internal/Private reviews
These provide very powerful internal information for practice management. Reviews are mapped back to the team members who saw the client and can therefore be split up and reported on by staff member. This means that the practice can identify if there are people who are not delivering a consistent customer experience. The comments left on the reviews also allows the practice manager to see if there are consistent complaints about things like price or unfriendly service. It gives a lot of clarity and eliminates the guesswork in identifying the key customer pain points.
Google and Facebook reviews
Data shows that around 75% of pet owners choose Google over Facebook when leaving reviews, despite expectations that Facebook’s widespread use would make it more popular. Additionally, pet owners who start a Facebook review are twice as likely to abandon the process, resulting in practices receiving about eight times more Google reviews than Facebook reviews when both options are offered. This suggests Google is considered the more trusted and preferred platform for social proof among veterinary clients.
A case study
A 2.5 full time vet practice opted to use the Profitdiagnostix Review service which was estimated to send out about 200 review requests per month.
They had very few Google reviews and had not had a new review on Google for over 1 year.
Their Google star rating was 4.5 which was in line with the average for practices in that area.
After sending out review requests for 3 months they received on average 3 new 5 star reviews on Google each month increasing their Google Star Rating to 4.7.
They also received about 110 internal review responses and comments on their customer service which they could then use to improve service quality.
The responses from clients were shared with their vets which they said had a positive effect on team morale especially in cases where some team members were relieved that customers were not complaining about prices.
It also starts to give the veterinary industry an idea of what the inherent cost of getting a single 5 star Google review is for a veterinary practice – which we now estimate to be in the region of $100 – and to our knowledge this is the first time anyone has tried to put an honest number to this.
Our closely associated hands on business advisory team at APL Accountants would agree that this value of $100 makes sense saying that:
“We often see veterinary practices try various methods to get Google reviews themselves and most seem to have little on going success. Their teams eventually lose motivation over a few weeks on account of the fact that it is a relatively small numbers game. Therefore using an automated system to do this for you will give better consistency and a long term effect of having a lot of reviews accumulate slowly over a number of months. Furthermore, we often see veterinary practices engage expensive marketing consultants to achieve this making grandiose claims that they will get hundreds of reviews in one month – we have never seen this happen”
