#206 Exposing the Top Review Killers in Dentistry

Now, let's talk about the biggest one. And this was my guess. I think I commented on one of your posts, and I was like, bet you the number one thing was this particular thing. And it is the biggest thing. - That was 49% of all reviews mentioned it. Stand alone, it did not matter. - Welcome back to another episode of Dental Marketing Theory. I'm your host, Gary Bird. I'm the owner of SMC National, where we help offices just like yours, love of the playing field against the big guys out there. So you can grow the way that you want, but you can't grow if you're getting a bunch of bad reviews. Today, I have the owner and CEO of dentistoffices.com, Evan, who is going to break down the top reason people leave bad Google reviews. And the last one's gonna blow your mind and it's very fixable. You can almost remove all bad Google reviews if you just solve this one problem. This is a very impactful episode. And at the end, we give you the list of why people leave bad reviews, how to respond to them, and Evan offered to do a free backlink to help you grow your SEO for free. Stay tuned. All right, we are alive and this is gonna be a good show because recently, I saw some, Evan, if you haven't seen Evan, you're probably not on Facebook very much, but he is all over the place on Facebook and he has great content. I'm always interacting with his content and he recently posted something that I was like, dude, this is so good. I gotta bring you on the show to talk about it because I think it could really help people. And he created a list. He touched over, I think, 100,000 offices and looked at their Google My Business and saw why, not what, but why patients leave bad reviews. And I was like, man, I gotta get you on and we gotta talk about this. And so today, we're gonna go over the top five reasons people leave bad reviews and then how to prevent it. And at the end of the show, we're gonna give you this list so you can go through it. You can see how to prevent these kind of bad reviews 'cause it really boils down just to a couple things. And Evan's gonna be giving away a free backlink to help you with your SEO from his website 'cause he has an amazing website. So you're gonna wanna stay tuned for this one and really listen to it. So first, Evan, how did this come about? How did you even think about asking for this list or pulling this list? - Right, so with Dentist Offices, we've taken reviews directly for a long time. So we do a lot with reviews. And we started seeing patterns in it. And just out of curiosity, I initially just started digging into a few thousand of them. Ones that have came directly through our platform. And I started looking and seeing that these patterns emerged regarding certain aspects of dentistry. So, I'd say we got bored a little bit, but we decided to run a much larger scale search across them to really understand better because it helps our clients, it helps our partners, and it's good to know. So we just started going through the whole list and we ran all different types of lookups and queries and did our best to organize it in a way that really helps to break down what's going on out there. - Sorry for interrupting the show, but I got something special for you. So we only got 27 more seats at our in-person event. We're gonna be helping you grow in 2026. We're gonna be putting together a growth map for you, helping you with attracting the right kind of team members, attracting the right kind of patients, and getting your systems in place for next year so you can actually grow. Now this event is normally 499, but I have a discount code down below for $199. Make sure you sign up right away. There's only a few seats left. We look forward to seeing you soon. Now back to the show. - All right, so let's jump into this. And just so everybody knows out here, you need to definitely check out Evan's website, DentistOffices.com, and check it out. It's a great platform, a lot of useful stuff on there, and it will help your practice. I don't think there's really any downside or why someone wouldn't go and at least consider it for their practice. And then from there, your wife's also a dentist. So this is not something he's just out here. He's not like me, like out here just marketing and stuff and has no idea what's going on. His wife is a dentist. He's very active on Facebook. So he understands dental, and this list really shows it. So let's jump into the list. Let's start on number five. We won't start with the biggest one, but this was only about 2% of people said this one. They mentioned a dirty office, cleanliness, or the vibe or the feel of the office, which I would put into like outdated, things like that. That was 2% of people out there that left bad reviews was something of that nature. - Yeah, it means that they mentioned that somewhere in the review, it was dirty office, cleanliness, hygiene, you know, even infection was part of this search that we did. So it wasn't a leading cause, but it was definitely up there. It was enough to make a percentage 'cause there were some things that just never hit the list. But that was one of them that, you know, but it was usually added on to the end. So it's just the icing on the cake, it seems like. - Got it, okay. So now, is this something we should even tackle? Like, I feel like if you are dealing with this problem, you and I probably aren't gonna be able to help them or give them any advice on avoiding this issue. Would you agree? - Yeah, yeah. That's, I mean, obviously there's procedures that can be put in place for cleanliness and sometimes it's the patient. Some patients think that dental needs to be sterile, right? And if they see that it's not like a perfectly sterile surgical environment, they can get nervous. So sometimes there's no helping us. It's just gonna happen. - Okay, so let's move on to number four then, which this one, it jumps a lot. So cleanliness, you know, the vibe of the office, 2% of reviews, 25% of people mentioned, and again, like you mentioned it, like a lot of people mentioned multiple different things. Most people just don't say one thing. So 25% of reviews had treatment and procedures issues. So this is botched, bad work, pain, redo, fixes, things like that. And I kind of feel bad for dentist on this one because dentistry is a weird industry because what feels like good dentistry to a patient might not be good dentistry. And what feels like bad dentistry might be good dentistry. And so this one's kind of a tricky one. - Yeah, it's too hard to tell. And a lot of the time, you know, we're in a field where people don't always understand what we do. So how do you show what good work is versus bad work? And I've seen it. I know dentists who are doing top quality work and they'll still get a review every now and then saying, like, oh, they did a bad job because the implant didn't take. There was nothing they could have done to prevent that, right? But they still get a review for it. - Yeah, so treatment and procedures. Do you feel like proactive communication is a big part of this and like planning for the worst? Is that part of how to avoid these kind of reviews? - Yeah, it's definitely education, patient education. But it's also, you'll notice like you were saying earlier, a lot of these stacked up. So a lot of the time, if there is an issue in dentistry, it can be resolved. And once they, you know, but once it's like they're rude, somebody's rude to them on top of it or they end up getting church fees that they didn't expect, that's when it all comes out about the, you know, poor quality work because usually it's just gonna be fixed. However, if a patient's coming back four times, they can't really help that. That's just- - So let's just play a hypothetical and I know it's hard to answer this, but let's just run through it. So if someone comes in and they have a great visit, everything goes super smoothly, but the feeling falls out or the crown pops off or whatever, more than likely that person isn't just gonna leave a bad review, they're just gonna call and say, hey, fix my problem. Is that right? - Of course. Now, it depends, but yeah, we had most people who were complaining about this had other things in tandem. So a lot of the time too, when they're gonna call, let's say the hypothetical situation, it also depends how it's handled. Are you answering the phone in an active manner? If it's an emergency after a treatment and the patient's in pain and the phone won't be answered and they don't know what you do and they have to go sit in the ER for six hours, they're gonna leave a bad review. But if you have an emergency line there for them, people are answering the phones. And I know you talk about the phones all the time, you're gonna get a much lower probability of getting a bad review for that. - Such a good point. So in other words, I go in, it's okay. I had to wait 20 minutes for my appointment pass, which you said I was gonna have to wait. I ended up getting the work done. I got billed more than they said that I was gonna get billed for and no one communicated with me about that. And then I go home and then the feeling falls out and I call the office and they don't answer. And then I have to call back three or four times before they answer for me to get back in. You're probably gonna get a bad review at that point, right? Like 'cause you triggered too many things along the way not to get a bad review. So that's such a great point. And again, if you want this list and you want the free backlink from Evan and his site, there's a link down below, you can go check that out. You'll be able to just put your email in and you'll get all that information for free. So now let's talk about the next one. This was just barely above treatment and procedures issue. So with 26% of patients scheduling and wait times, 45 minutes plus was huge, but even double that was 30 minutes plus. And then also was mentioned canceled on me. So I already know, we already know what's going on here 'cause dentists are notorious for running behind. - Yeah, and that's what it is. And you can be pretty much assured if somebody comes in, especially at the high end office, you have a nice brand, you have great dentistry, it does not matter if they have to sit there for 45 minutes or an hour of their day waiting with other people in the waiting room. They know that they've been overbooked, they feel unimportant. That's something that can be controlled by almost every office we work with. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on that side. - There's the illusion of running behind and then there's ways to actually fix that to your point, right? So like when I go to a dental office or a medical office and they're like, okay, your appointment's at 12, I show up, I check in, I get there early, 12 o'clock rolls around, 20 minutes later, they still haven't called me, there's four other people still in front of me, that's giving me the illusion, not the illusion, like you are running behind. But you can actually, if you can get people seated and beginning the process, like you can fix that, right? Like it's not a hard thing to stage people, get them into a room, get them sat down and say, hey, we're gonna get to you. And then start running through some of the things that you need to do with them. You can do that without having the feeling that you're running behind, but you actually are running behind, right? - Yeah, no, that's exactly what it is. That's what we do at our office, is we make sure when a patient walks in, they go through intake, talk to the front desk, within a few minutes, they're brought into the op. It does not matter if somebody doesn't like to use that op, it doesn't matter if the main dentist op is filled, they get brought into the chair. And that's so important and that's why we personally have never gotten a wait time review, but we all run behind. So that's one thing that once the patient, at least if they're getting interacted with every 10 minutes that wait time goes away, it's no longer wait time. So coming up with procedures to kind of direct the way the patient experience moves forward is a big help. - I think one thing for me, this wasn't in the reviews, but this is the way I think about it. If I'm sitting in the chair in the lobby, I'm probably on my phone and just scrolling, you know what I mean? And kind of like, okay, when are they gonna get to me? When are they gonna get to me? There's something that happens when I lay back in the chair and I'm still scrolling on my phone, but my brain changes like now I'm in my appointment. You know what I mean? Like there's a difference between sitting in the office chair straight up and laying back because you don't normally lay back. And so I would say get the patient laying back as fast as possible. - I never even thought about that. That's genius. Yeah, that would absolutely work. It's like when you're on hold with any company, right? You know, some companies they'll check in with you about every 10 minutes. Hey, I'm still working on this. If you were just sitting there that whole time with the hold music, it's gonna feel a lot worse. - 100%. So yeah, and I think everybody kind of expects 10 minutes. You know what I mean? It's when you get pushed up 20 minutes, 30 minutes. And I can see here that you, a lot of people left reviews for they made me wait 30 minutes. They made me wait 45 minutes. It's kind of like now you're, you wasted a whole block of time. Does that make sense? 'Cause we all work in calendars. And so it's like, I don't really block my calendar in 10 minutes. I block it in 15, maybe 30, most people in an hour. So when you start blowing whole blocks of time with no communication, people are gonna get ticked off 'cause they could have done something else with that time. And now you just wasted it. And so a lot of that can be prevented. All right, let's talk about the next one. 'Cause this one actually, this is a big one. This, so we went from 25% for treatment and procedures, 26% for scheduling and wait times. And then we jumped all the way to 39%. That's a big. Now you're pushing into huge swaths of people. They mentioned manners and dental struggles with this. And people don't, I talk about this a lot, but people kind of brush me off when I talk about it. Rude was mentioned almost 14,000 times. Where yeah, dismissive 5,000. And then called me names was mentioned. - 616 times, yeah, called me names. There wasn't a lot more that I was gonna put in there. Like people were very specific with the names they were called. So they got some of the reviews, got a little funny, especially through our platform, because we don't censor the way that Google does sometimes. So we get some funny ones. And it's always, that is the number one cause though, for like standalone reviews too, is people being rude. - Meaning they didn't put any other reason of why they're leaving a review. They're just like, these people are rude. - Yep, I will put that in the list to what percentage of these were standalone. So when people download that from your site, that'll kind of give more insight into that. But yeah, it was, if they were called the name, a lot of the time it's the front desk. I see, we actually have one review here. I don't know if you wanna go over them right now. Basically they went and said how great the doctor was. They said the doctor's amazing, nothing but nice. But the front desk, the front office manager, was the one who was dismissive. And they don't know what their job is. And you know, this is paraphrasing. But that shows that no matter how good the dentist is, the bad front desk staff will still get you a one-star review. - That's so rough. And here's the thing, I tell people go call 10 offices in your market, 10 of your direct competitors and ask a basic dental questions. Like, hey, when can you get me in? Or hey, do you have, how much is the liners? Or hey, how much is an input? Just like basic, basic questions, seven to eight of those offices are gonna be really rude to you. And I feel like medical as a whole, we begin to lack empathy. Because we do what we do every day. I do dental marketing, you guys run a dental office, people are listeners, you guys, you see all these patients coming in and out and you just see the same problems. But patients are actually very fearful of the dentist, like very, very scared of the dentist. And so when they're calling and asking a basic question, they're usually working through some level of fear, anxiety, and then we get dismissive 'cause it's like, well, you're like the 100th person to ask me this stupid question. We don't say that necessarily, but we have that attitude. And when that happens, like patients are going to say that. The other thing, I see this happen closer to the chair around like treatment coordinating or hygiene. I see this happen a lot too. What's the fix to this though? 'Cause I definitely am not qualified for the fix around this one. - Yeah, the fix for this is staff training, right? That's what it's going to come down to. Nobody's gonna care as much as the owner does. Right now, if you're the owner and you're rude, that's a whole different problem that I'm not even gonna get into, okay? But it is about staff training. The review I was looking for, I'll get a little bit more in detail on it. It says, the owner slash owners must not value the reputation of the clinic. She is rude beyond means and very loud. Don't ever think you can discuss your account with her in an adult manner because she will let you and everyone in hearing distance know she don't care and not her problem. Now, she don't care. So when that starts happening, you know, that's just an issue with staffing. But it's also the owner's not paying attention. They should be doing call reviews. And I tell people this all the time, if they have low conversion rates and marketing and they're saying, well, we're getting calls, but they're not going into the chair. Review your calls. Review how they're talking to the patients. And if it's a problem, you need to address it. But a lot of people let their front office staff run their office and that's a problem. - It is a problem. You know, I was just talking with, I train our team on this and I was just talking to somebody else who manages a lot of dental practices. And we were talking about how to get the owner doctor to care about what's happening on the phones. And what happens is, is like, I have data for days, right? So our team says, hey doc, your team is converting it 50% with these marketing patients. You're losing thousands of dollars. Yeah, I know, I know, Heumann Hall, you know, whatever, whatever. So what I teach them is, okay, when you get to that place where they're kind of empathetic towards the data, 'cause they've heard it so many times, you have to then send an individual example, because it's kind of like this. If you hear a politician on TV talk about, you know, SB777, you know, this, that and the other and the economic impact, you kind of tune it out 'cause you're like, whatever, bro, I don't care. But when they bring a little girl up on the stage or the platform and they say, hey, this little girl here lost her parents to drunk driving. And so SB777 is gonna prevent little girls, like that from happening to little girls, like this again, all of a sudden you care because it's an individual example. And so sometimes what you have to do is you have to send the doctor, and if you're listening to this and you're a client, I've trained our team to do this, you have to send them something that's gonna light a fire under them that they hear their team being rude. And they come to realize like, oh, we're being rude to patients and that will light that fire for them to actually act more so than the data, you know what I mean? - Yeah, oh, and that's a perfect example. I love that because I've seen it and I have seen it get fixed, okay? But it always comes down to playing those calls back to, to the people who are on them. It's like you just said, making sure that they realize that they're being rude. First off, some people don't even realize it. They just think everybody's being rude to them. And that's not always the case. And sometimes you gotta let patients be rude to you. You shouldn't let them walk all over you, but you gotta give a little bit of slack, you know? - Yep, empathy. You gotta practice empathy. You gotta assume, okay, maybe they're scared. Maybe we do this with doctors 'cause sometimes doctors are short with our team. Now, I won't let anybody cuss out my team and I won't let anybody like fly off the handle with my team. We'll fire a client if they do that. But I also try to teach them, guys, they're stressed. They're running a practice. They're working their butts off. They don't have enough new patients. They don't even realize their team is the reason yet. We haven't done a good job getting them to understand that yet. So let's have a little bit of empathy. I think that goes a long way. Now, let's talk about the biggest one. And this was my guess. I think I commented on one of your posts and I was like, bet you the number one thing was this particular thing. And it is the biggest thing. And it's the thing that everybody cares about and it's money, it's finances, it's billing. - It is, it is absolutely billing. That was 49% of all reviews mentioned it. Stand-alone, it did not matter. It was insurance-related, cancellation fees. Cancelation fees were huge. As they're actually pretty much neck-and-neck, insurance and cancellation fees here. And I want to clarify because a lot of people, when I said, oh, it was cancellation fees, you're like, well, we need to normalize that. I fully agree. We charge cancellation fees, right? But the problem is lack of communication about those cancellation fees. The problem isn't that insurance didn't cover it. The problem is that the office didn't properly educate the patient on how insurance works or didn't run the PDs properly. They didn't do what was needed to show the patient, you might owe something after if insurance doesn't cover it. - Yeah, and so it's so easy because you gotta train your team to make the insurance the bad guy. You have to, like, hey, we're gonna do everything. We aren't here to treat your insurance. We are here to treat you, the patient, and we're gonna do what's best for you. And sometimes the insurance is gonna go along with it and sometimes they're not. And that, we can't really control that. And we're gonna do the best that we can to optimize it, but that's out of our control. And if you don't make the insurance the bad guy, I guess who becomes the bad guy? It becomes you, right? Yeah, and you become the problem. And here's the thing, Dennis gets so mad about this, but I'm just like, how often do you talk to your patient? And they're like, oh, every six months for this long. How often does the insurance company talk to the patient? Probably never. So who controls the relationship? You do. You set all the terms, all the boundaries, all the expectations. You're just not setting proper expectations. Now, I wanna jump into the late fee thing. So I think every practice should have cancellation charges, but I always, and you might disagree, and I would love to hear maybe there's a better way to do it. I always tell people, you should have them, but you should never use them. And it should always go, hey, we normally have a cancellation fee, but I'm gonna not charge it to you this time, but I'm not really supposed to do that. So just promise me you're gonna fix that, blah, blah, blah. And what I have found when you present it that way is like most people comply, like the vast majority of people comply with that, and then you never get those bad reviews. What are your thoughts on that, or how do you tackle that? - Still, that's not a bad way of going about it. We operated without cancellation fees at our offices and a lot of our partner's offices for a long time, but recently I did start pushing people to charge cancellation fee and to make it happy. And the reason for that is because an office still has overhead, right? In any other world, okay, when you go in to do something, if you don't show up, you still pay for that. So dentistry people have, and people are always looking for excuse not to go to the dentist. They don't wanna go, right? So it could be a sniffle and they don't show up. It's different from any other field of medical. People just don't show up. You notice people always make their cosmetic cases. They make their veneer placement. They don't make their hygiene, okay? So I am, I'm not against charging it, but what I do say is that it's very important that when the patient makes, if you are gonna charge it, when they make that appointment, tell them audibly, hey, you are going to be charged a cancellation fee if you change this appointment within 24 hours. - What is the fee that you charge? Like, or that you said hefty? - $75 to $100, yeah, not too hefty, but I need some people do 20. - Get like $500 when you- - Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's 75 to 100 is what I recommend. And the reason for that is because when it's hefty, you can cut it down and still say, you know what, I'll give you a half off, or we'll get 50%, usually the first one should be free. That's what we do for one person. So both into their chart. - Okay, so we're on the same page. Like I hear what you're saying. So you're talking about a multi-step process, 'cause I know what Dennis are gonna do. They're gonna be like, let's charge everybody everything. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. You got to, first of all, you got to communicate, and you got to make it very clear if this happens, and it has to be audibly. I like that you added that, 'cause I already know someone will try to put it in the small print and the person signs, and they're like, you sign that, it doesn't matter if they signed it, we all know that. We all sign a ton of stuff that we have no idea where we're signing. And then, so you got to say it audibly, and then when they try to do it, then you say, hey, I'm supposed to charge you this, but this time I'm not gonna do it. Let's get you rescheduled, which is what I was saying at the first one. And then the second time you nail them with it if they do it again, because now you probably have somebody who doesn't really care, right? - Right, right. If they already know, they're already aware, and they're making the choice not to show up. Again, I understand, we've heard the craziest excuses, and it's always on hygiene visits, right? So you got to start doing the math. Now, it's a shame because there are people who do have real emergencies that come up, right? And you can use your best judgment. If a real emergency comes up, somebody ends up in the hospital, death in the family, of course, has some empathy, has some compassion. But I've heard everything from my house got robbed on my way here to the, it's just stories, okay? And so that's why I will kind of enforce that front desk charges them. But yes, usually first one's almost always free. And that helps to increase that level of communication where people say, now I know about it. You can never say you didn't know. And we've never gotten a negative review, and most of our partners who do it that way, never seen a negative review from it. - All right, I love this. So if you just solved that one thing, this one thing with fees and how you communicate, and a lot of it is just, you're already probably communicating about it, your team knows the answers, you just need to proactively communicate it. If you do that, half of your bad reviews disappear. Is that right? Am I understanding it right? - Absolutely, well, it's going to contribute to half of them disappearing, right? It's all communication though. And so your spot on, if this factor disappeared, right? If you properly communicated every aspect of your dentistry, I'd imagine all that's gonna be left as those one-stars you get where it's unpleasable people, right? Because there are some people that will never be happy. Doesn't matter how good you are, how great you are. I have a guy I work with right now. He's a 5.0 on hundreds and hundreds of reviews. Amazing dentist. And there's always still, there was just a situation where somebody was unhappy for something that was completely out of anybody's control. And it's going to ruin that rating, hopefully not, but it's, you know, then you got to worry about that, just because you have one person who's a little unhinged. And so you can't avoid that. - That's awesome. Well, okay, so we got a lot of things going on here. So we're gonna, down below, we have a list of these bad reviews with the key words that people left them in. This will help you get less bad reviews just by having this list. So Evan, you're gonna provide that list for us and amazing work on that. Number two, you're gonna get a backlink from Evan's website, which is very powerful 'cause it has a lot of dentists on it. So very valuable from an SEO standpoint, completely free. Just check the box that you want that so you can download the list, get that backlink, just say yes, if you don't want it, mark no. And then also, I'm gonna include a training on how to turn your worst review into your best review by how you respond to it. So I'm gonna give you the scripting on how to flip that around 'cause a lot of people read the bad reviews first, I do. I know a lot of people do that. It's a hack on saving time and not having to do a lot of work. It's just see what their worst review is, see how the office dealt with it. Tells you a lot about the office. So I have that scripting for you. Now, just tell us a little bit about your company, what you guys do, why you do it, how you do it, all that good stuff. - Right, so dentistsoffices.com, it's a bolt-on to your marketing. It's a new flow of patients that you can tap into. And we are a smart directory, first and foremost, but we also attract patients in a few different ways, directly referred to us. We help to maneuver them around. The patients look to us as a guide through dentistry, help them find providers that accept their insurance, that offer the procedures they need. So we have 150,000 practices on the platform, 10,000 that are actively engaged, registered users. We wanna increase that. It's free to join, right? But what's not free is that backlink. So that's why, and people who watch, you already know what a backlink is usually, but for those that don't, it's a way of giving your personal website more authority because we have a lot of authority. So when we link back to you in a way that shows Google, oh, wow, these guys, you earn that authority. So I highly recommend that for anybody and just join. Extra patients for you, whether you wanna upgrade to one of the paid plans or you wanna stay free, patients are patients. And I imagine Gary will agree with that. - 100%, especially free patients are the best ones, right? Yeah, the ones you don't have to work super hard for and push for. So awesome job, man, I really appreciate you coming on. And I appreciate the way that you tackle all these problems. There's a lot of, obviously, people who do any kind of marketing have a bad name and dental. So I appreciate the way you're always just attacking this information and doing it in a way that builds trust and educates at the same time. I really value that, I try to do that, but you do an amazing job of that. - No, you do an amazing job as well. That's why I always push anybody over to SMC, especially when they're looking for those marketing and lead gen services, because you guys do a great job. And it's all about education, right? That's all it's about. So if I can get out there and educate, you know, the partners are gonna come after, people are gonna see and they learn, they understand authenticity. So that's what I'm going for. - Awesome, man. Thanks so much for coming on. Let's do another one of these soon. I know you got some other cool resources coming down the pipeline. So I would love to do another one with you and everybody here, check out the website, Evan's website. Also check out the free resources below. It's a lot of great information. - Yeah, thanks for having me, Gary. I appreciate it.