By Sarah Babaç, MBA
The majority of patients will leave your practice after their procedure or appointment without giving you their honest feedback. They will, however, share their experience with their friends and family—especially if it was mediocre or negative.
Wait, you may ask. Why especially if it was mediocre or negative?
The fact is that one bad experience is much more powerful than a positive one. Thanks to the negativity bias, it’s something we are always working against.
So, how do you become aware of vulnerabilities of your practice that create these negative experiences and create an opportunity to correct them?
SIXSTAR was born out of the “bottom of the market,” with practices consistently reporting an inability to gain reviews. Staff had several excuses: patients in their area simply didn’t leave reviews for products or services; their patient demographic was elderly and didn’t own or know how to use a smartphone; they just felt uncomfortable asking patients. The list goes on.
At Nuvolum, we took on a bet that you can gain reviews in any market when positioned correctly. Not only that, but you can gain a consistent stream of content-rich 5-star reviews. What came out of this bet was something more than we could have ever imagined. We found a solution in the Four Actions Framework.
First introduced in the bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kima and Renée A. Mauborgne, the Four Actions Framework and Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create (ERRC) Grid identified a clear problem that the current OMS market had no solution for.
How do oral surgery offices:
- Eliminate staff friction in asking for reviews and noncompliance by staff members?
- Reduce poor staff attitudes and avoid negative reviews?
- Raise patient satisfaction and therefore five-star reviews?
- Create practice efficiency and a feedback loop of all patient experiences (positive and negative) that get reported back to the doctor unfiltered?
Using this framework and the solutions we had at hand, we realized a new “blue ocean” was born.
SIXSTAR was developed by shifting the strategy of helping a practice gain reviews to offering a service that brings clarity to patients’ experiences to the doctors that was previously unavailable. This feedback loop ultimately results in an increase of five-star reviews as well as word of mouth patients.
SIXSTAR simultaneously pursued differentiation for OMS practices and opened a new market space by focusing on four distinct actions:
- Taking “the ask” of a review out of staff’s hands to eliminate staff friction and noncompliance.
- Helping patients feel more comfortable sharing their experience to reduce poor staff attitudes and provide honest feedback.
- Following a psychologically proven script to raise patient satisfaction, address any issues, and deliver more positive reviews of higher quality.
- Creating a feedback loop to the doctors and staff of every patient’s experience: with qualitative and quantitative data, complete with actionable insights, practices have an exact roadmap to optimizing their practice.
Optimize your practice by asking the right strategic questions and putting systems in place that provide a feedback loop of patients’ experience. SIXSTAR harnesses the power of feedback to give you the insights you need to drive your practice forward.
Sarah Babaç, MBA
Nuvolum
Sarah is the Vice President of Client Strategy at Nuvolum, the agency of record for SIXSTAR. She has meticulously studied the OMS market for nearly a decade. Sarah holds an MBA from Sonoma State University and a certificate of Disruptive Strategy from Harvard Business School Online.
CASE STUDY
From August of 2015 to August of 2016, Siouxland Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery gained 92 social reviews. After the practice joined SIXSTAR in August 2016, their first year of service came with 302 reviews, more than tripling the amount that they had gained in the previous year. This growth continued steadily over the next 3 years, with the practice adding 376 reviews (409% of their annual gain without SIXSTAR) in the 2019–2020 period. By bolstering their reputation for elite service with high-quality reviews, Siouxland Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery has become a dominant player in their market. They boast over 2,000 cumulative reviews, re-affirming their professionalism and their commitment to positive patient experiences. In addition to the dramatic increase in review quantity, SIXSTAR has enabled them to optimize their patients’ experience through valuable feedback that they would have never gotten otherwise.
