As most doctors will tell you, there’s a lot more to a dental practice than simply achieving the best medical results. Keeping patients happy is a multi-faceted task requiring versatile skill sets. If any one aspect goes too poorly, patients will quickly perceive a bad experience. Unhappy customers lead to bad reviews which lead to fewer new patients. It’s a cycle we can all relate to with one business or another that we’ve visited. Whether it was slow service, poor quality, a dirty environment or the way we were treated, there are plenty of reasons we decided to not go back. In the above graphic (created using tagcrowd.com), we’ve visualized the fifteen most common words from fifty bad reviews of a sampling of dental practices nationwide. Though not exactly a huge sample size, this graphic helps to illustrate what is important to patients. We noticed that many of the words mentioned most often were unrelated to the medical care that the patient received but instead revolved around inconveniences and front office issues. There may be a few factors at play here (including the offices we chose to study) but this data certainly seems to fall in line with many of the poor reviews we encounter which indicate the importance of the entire patient experience.
