Transcription:

Bill Klaproth (Host): This is a special podcast produced for the 26th Annual Healthcare Marketing and Physician Strategy Summit, HMPS, as we speak with session presenters and keynote speakers. With me is Annie Hafner Haarmann, Head of Healthcare Strategy and Consulting at Reputation. Annie, at HMPS-21, you did a session titled Use Consumer Search Intent to Drive Volumes and Improve Experience. So, Reputation surveyed consumers nationwide about what drives their choice of a healthcare provider. And analyzed hundreds of thousands of online reviews to understand consumer sentiment. So Annie, what did you learn? What do consumers want to see when they search for care?

Annie Hafner Haarmann (Guest): Yes, we did a two part study. The first part of this was a national consumer survey across all markets through a third party, where we asked consumers specifically why and how do they choose a provider or a location for care? And one of the things that was very interesting to us, was that more and more, the consumerism being driven by patients today, is really around feedback. And if you think about it, right now, we live in a feedback economy. Anyone can research anything before making a purchase decision. And these third party ratings and reviews, influence everything from the shoes you're shopping for on Amazon to a restaurant in your neighborhood.

And so this expectation has now extended to healthcare, where ratings and reviews are now the third most important factor when patients are choosing healthcare. It's right after insurance and location. What's really been a surprise to us and a pleasant surprise actually, is that in the past, this third factor after insurance and location, was brand. And this most recent year, what consumers told us was it's no longer brand, it's online ratings and reviews from other patients like me. And what this tells us is that you don't own your brand anymore. If you're a healthcare brand, your patients own that brand. And potential patients want to hear from others like them. So, you have to be looking at what that online feedback is, because consumers trust online reviews.

Host: So, when you say your patients own the brand. So, when someone is looking at the ratings and the reviews, it's all about what your patients say about you and what they say about you basically becomes the brand. Is that right?

Annie: Absolutely. And not only that, but it also becomes the way that you are found online. So, we know that Google has become ubiquitous for everything, whatever you're shopping for. And as consumers become shoppers for healthcare, Google is now a critical entry point for healthcare brands to optimize. And it's the number one review site. It's the number one place where consumers are starting their search. And it could be the only place they end up going, because Google is increasingly recognizing that feedback is important and prioritizing Google My Business results based on consumer feedback and the completeness of those listings. So, it's not just about what your consumers say your brand is, it's also about what those others might be seeing based on what people are saying. And it's all being built into that search algorithm.

Host: Right. So, Google is now a critical entry point, as you say, and you brought up Google My Business. Are many hospitals utilizing Google My Business to their full extent? And it sounds like they should be, cause you call that a critical entry point. It sounds like our Google My Business pages should be fully filled out and all of the tools that they provide for us, we should be using those tools. Is that right? Can you talk about the importance of Google My Business?

Annie: Absolutely. One of the things that we say a lot around here at Reputation is Google loves its own products. Google loves to keep consumers in search. They love to keep you in Google My Business. And in fact, if you're doing a mobile search, 81% of healthcare search is around symptoms. So, if I'm searching, let's say symptoms of a hernia or what does a hernia feel like, I'm going to start with those results at the top. And Google is now going to take me through a journey that Google is guiding. It's going to show me symptoms, treatments, specialists.

And if I want to access care and I click on that care near me; I'm going to see that local three pack, those three Google results that show up at the top before you click any further. And if you are a healthcare brand and you are not optimizing for this, you are missing out. And increasingly, Google is putting more weight on its own products. So, 33% of the weighted ranking factors for organic search on Google is driven it's own Google My Business. The second most important factor is reviews and that's 16% of the weighted ranking. The third most important factor at 15% is your own OnPage SEO.

So, what this tells us is your own website is no longer your front door. And it is important because brand awareness is important. That organic keyword search is important. But the only way to get consumers to convert, is by optimizing everywhere you can. And that means optimizing your Google My Business. And in fact, the most recent studies that we've seen from some of the third party SEO analyst groups, like White Spark and Search Engineland and even from Google themselves, is that 65% of organic searches on Google end in a conversion within a Google product. So, what does that mean? That means that 65% of those that run an organic search and come up with a set of results; they're going to convert from right there in the Google knowledge panel, right there in Google My Business. They're not going to make it to your website to convert. So, you want to make sure that everything they can do in Google My Business is possible through your complete information. Whether that's engaging in Q and A, activating business messaging, making sure that your providers have plenty of photos and content that is optimized to the services and specialties that they provide. So, it's no longer enough just to send people to your website, through paid search. You've got to have that local search optimized so that you're not missing out on those zero click conversions.

Host: Right. A lot of good stuff to unpack there Annie. I love how you said Google loves their own products. I love that. You also said, and this is really interesting, 81% of healthcare searches deal with symptoms. That is really good to know how people are searching when they're using Google. And you also said your website is no longer your front door. You've got to optimize everywhere you can. And 65% of organic searches end in a Google product.

So I'm wondering, and you talked about the knowledge grab. Should we offer appointments through the knowledge grab? Is that something right, when they are right there offer them a way to click to make an appointment?

Annie: Absolutely. And I remember several years ago, when I was working on this, myself within my own, programs, and one of the questions was, well, where do we want to send them to schedule an appointment? We want all of those clicks happening on our website, right? Because then we've got traffic there and that indicates that we're optimizing search. But what we've learned is that the way that consumers behave, they may never even get to your website. So we want to enable them to convert from wherever they can. And that means right there in the Google knowledge panel. And in fact, our co presenter at, HMPS this year was CHS, Community Health Systems. And what they have done is they have looked at the difference between online scheduling on their website and online scheduling that is happening through Google My Business. And what was very interesting to them was that their number one source of online scheduling is Google My Business. And it's because they've made it so easy. If I'm searching for care, especially for these lower acuity services, like urgent care, walk-in care, primary care, I can do that from right within the results. Why wouldn't I click on that and get my appointment as, as quick as possible? Why would I go through your website? Find the link, go through extra steps when I can do that from right within my, top three results that I'm getting on Google.

Host: So this should be a wake-up call to all of us. Make sure that you completely optimize your Google My Business listing. I would imagine there's some hospitals that may not even be on it that haven't even started the listing yet. This seems like low hanging fruit. We all should go do right away. Is that correct?

Annie: Yes. And the great thing about it is that, this is going to sound counterintuitive. But the great thingabout this is that Google is making it so robust and adding so many different attributes all the time. So, you're never going to be done with this. This is not the kind of thing that you set and forget. But what that means for healthcare brands is that, like you said, the fruit is low hanging and you can scale your program. You don't have to start with everything right out of the gate. Start with getting all of your data complete. Claim all of those listings. Start requesting reviews. Get that online feedback. Start engaging with consumers by answering Q and A or activating business messaging. And this is the kind of thing that, as we work with our clients on this with each step, with each thing that they activate, they see another uptick. And so they're able to scale their growth rather than getting frozen in place by trying to do it all at once and not being able to get there. It's a much more agile way of approaching this growth and these improvements.

Host: Well, you talked about ratings and reviews and you just gave us one tip there about asking for reviews. So knowing the importance of ratings and reviews and optimizing our Google My Business page, how do we optimize and or improve our patient experience in real time to make sure that our ratings and reviews are good?

Annie: That's an excellent question. And it's that third and most important piece. When you think about the three things that go into your digital front door and that online experience. You know, first, you've got to be found. Second, people have got to select you over other brands. But third, you've got to do something with that information. So you see all of this feedback, you're collecting feedback in the form of ratings and reviews, and then you've got to use that to make improvements to your operation. And what we have seen is that by pulling in all of your sources of both structured data, things like cap surveys or pulse surveys, other types of structured feedback that you're getting, pull all of that in, and then also pull in your unstructured data. So things like your Facebook comments and posts on Twitter and online ratings and reviews on Google My Business. Pull all of those things into a single place and you can start to see a much more robust data set, to give you that voice of the customer and identify with pinpoint accuracy, where improvements are needed and what improvements you need to make.

So for example, we did a study recently where we analyzed all of the key feedback themes that come in through caps. And we compared that to the key feedback themes that are coming in through unstructured feedback, like Google reviews. And when you look at them, a lot of it is overlapped. So, you know, you'd expect that it's going to be similar sentiment around things like, wait times or doctor competence, bedside manner, those kinds of things.

But where we really saw a difference between the two data sets, was that in online reviews, there was a lot more concern around things like parking or cleanliness or the accessibility of the facilities. These are all things that maybe aren't coming up in some of your structured or required surveys that you're doing. But people are talking about them. And so there's value in asking for a review and asking for that quick real-time feedback so that you can address some of those issues before they ever become a problem in your operation. And in fact, you can do service recovery from that, review request that comes through within, you know, 24, 48 hours.

Versus waiting until you get your cap surveys back and then seeing that, oh, you've had a problem for a while and it's a trend. You can start to cut that off and address things in real time, making again, those incremental improvements so that you're not having to face, you know, a huge Delta between the customer expectation and what you're able to deliver for them.

Host: That's right. What's that old saying inch by inch, it's a cinch yard by yard, it's very hard. I think that's it. So, that's really interesting what you're saying about getting the surveys out or, and reviews, if you will, to find out what people are thinking and what the friction points are. You mentioned maybe there's a problem with the parking lot. Maybe the cleanliness of the facility. We're all so focused on care, care, care. The things like parking are a big issue. And now that you know that, you can address it. So this all makes so much sense. If you're getting bad ratings because of bad parking or the, the washrooms aren't clean, man you've got to either know that and then get in there and fix that so you don't have this problem of people giving you bad reviews because of things like that. So, this really makes a lot of sense. Annie, do you have, you kind of give us an example there? Do you have any other best practices or examples from a leading health system that sometimes that helps us understand this a little better? Anybody that's really doing it right that you can share a story with us?

Annie: Absolutely. I mean, I mentioned that our partners at CHS, Community Health Systems, they are doing some really exciting work and they've seen some extraordinary results. And in the approach, looking at this feedback in real time, getting issues to the right people to conduct service recovery. And for them, they've ranked among our top leading health systems by reputation score for the past couple of years now. And it wasn't always that way. When they saw that their reputation score was not great, they started putting in a lot of conserted effort there and in the process, they're aiming toward that metric of having a high reputation score. But it's not about the score and it's not about the ranking. They would explain it, it's really about the service that they're delivering and the care for their community. And, you know, we see that in all of the partners that we work with.

For example, we had one recently where they were looking at different locations and they noticed that one of their regional clinics was starting to have some negative sentiment around the nursing staff, which was a surprise. It was an outlier because usually, the nursing staff is the favorite. You know, everyone loves the nurses.

People who are nurses tend to be the best kind of people. So they get high ratings. So they looked into it. They shared this feedback with the leader at that location and what they uncovered was. Thisparticular location had had some recent turnover and they had hired on several new staff members. And so they had kind of a learning curve in some of the protocols. It was, and it was coming through to the patients. You know, they were feeling like things were disorganized. They were feeling like things were not being communicated appropriately from team to team.

And it was showing up in the results. And so what they did is they were able to pinpoint that because, looking at the reputation score, it was like the thermometer to tell them that there was an issue here. And by digging into it more, they were able to diagnose that problem.

And then they made some operational improvements. They launched some retraining. They did some additional communication with their new hires. And, when they started asking for reviews after they had implemented some of these changes, they went from a score of on a scale of negative 100 to 100.

They went from a negative 37 to a positive 77 in six months. So it just shows that these kinds of improvements are possible, but only if you're listening. And only if you have the right data set to make strategic decisions about the operation that you're delivering.

Host: So well put, make sure that you're listening, number one. And then you've got to pay attention to the data set to make these right decisions. Does that kind of sum it up?

Annie: Absolutely.

Host: Yeah. I love that. This has been so informative. I love these podcasts when people like you, Annie just kind of open our eyes to things that we might go, oh, I didn't think about that, but this has been so good. Annie, anything else you want to add about using consumer search intent to drive volume and improve experience? The floor is yours. Anything else you want to say to us?

Annie: Yes. Well, I would love for everyone to check out reputation.com. We have a number of free resources available to you, to any healthcare system. You can check out your own reputation score and see how you compare to others that are maybe local competition. We also have a variety of resources, our report, where we publish the results of our studies and our analysis of the past year is available for download, as well as great white papers on key healthcare trends. And we've already started working on the next year's report, with some great research through our third party. We're really looking forward to sharing those results. So check that out coming next year in 2022.

Host: So that sounds like a really good place to start is just type your type your health care system in and see what pops up right. To see what your reputation is. It sounds like a good place to start.

Annie: Absolutely.

Host: Yeah, Annie, this has really been fascinating and eye-opening. Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate this.

Annie: Thank you for having us.

Host: And once again, that's Annie Hafner Haarmann. And for more information, please visit healthcarestrategy.com/summit. Thanks for listening.