Google’s Review Policy Update

Last week Google quietly updated its Review Policy, which will change how businesses can solicit reviews from their customers. Google’s new policy explains that if you’re soliciting reviews from customers, then you need to ask all of them for reviews regardless of their experience. In addition, Google added a policy earlier this year that advises businesses against asking customers for reviews in bulk, which suggests asking customers one at a time.

Google’s Review Policy changes, highlighted above, state:

• Don’t discourage or prohibit negative reviews or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers
• Don’t solicit reviews from customers in bulk

As we discussed before, Google is one of the top sites for ratings and reviews in healthcare. Therefore, it’s crucial that healthcare providers adapt to these changes in order to manage their online reputation — the right way.

Doctible’s Adjustments for Google’s Review Policy

Doctible is a platform that helps doctors attract and retain patients. One way our platform does this is with our Reputation Management solution. This solution automates collection of patient feedback, provides useful analytics on patient sentiment, and helps providers generate reviews via review requests.

We have always recommended sending review requests to all patients — regardless of experience — so that all patients are heard. To further comply with Google’s new policies, we have instituted the following terms to our Reputation Management solution.

1. Reviews for all experiences: All patients will have the option to write reviews, regardless of their experience. This is a change from our previous review request design. Google does not want businesses to selectively ask patients for reviews, so all patients will be given the opportunity.
2. No bulk solicitation: Only patients who have recently interacted with healthcare providers can be sent a review request. Our solution already complies with this policy because we only reach out to patients who recently visited their healthcare provider.

We believe this new change is a positive step for healthcare providers. More than 70 percent of patients start their search for healthcare providers online. Patients are savvy consumers that understand not every review will be a 5-star experience. They know that nobody’s perfect. And transparency builds trust with healthcare providers, which is key to attracting new patients.

All new customers will have their Reputation Management solution configured to comply with Google’s new Review Policy. Existing customers will have a few weeks to migrate to the new experience.