It’s no secret that the dental industry has had a love/hate relationship with Yelp and other online review hubs.
Avoiding online reviews has proven to be nearly impossible and tending a dental practice’s online reputation has become a standard part of doing business. Negative patient reviews can harm a dental practice, while positive reviews can help new patients fill the schedule. Now those positive Yelp reviews might become even more valuable as the company announced its new Yelp Platform service in a blog post today.
Billed in the post as a new transaction service, Yelp Platform is really a partnership between Yelp and other online service companies. The system will allow people to order food for delivery or pickup or schedule appointments without ever leaving a business’ Yelp profile. It’s being launched in the restaurant category today via a partnership with online delivery services Eat24 and delivery.com. Yelp plans to roll it out to other categories via other similar partnerships in the future.
Dental practices are specifically mentioned in the blog post, and eService provider Demandforce is mentioned as one of the supporting technology partners powering Yelp Platform. This means the Yelp profile of dental practices working with Demandforce may soon allow patients to schedule an appointment.
While dentists might not love Yelp, scheduling via the site can be a powerful tool. Rather than navigating to the dental practice’s website or picking up the phone, patients inspired by positive reviews will be just one click away from making that appointment. Yelp Platform certainly seems like a positive innovation for practices able to participate.
But that right there is where this new service gets a bit tricky. Dental practices have Yelp profiles whether or not they ask for one. Any consumer can create a profile on Yelp to post a review of any business. Sure a practice can monitor and tend to that profile, but you can’t simply opt out of Yelp. And with Yelp Platform, dental practices working with Demandforce will have profiles that included enhanced, interactive features. Practices working with other eServices companies might not have the same options.
If two practices in the same area are each well reviewed, but one has the Demandforce-Yelp Platform scheduling feature and the other doesn’t, that one might seem more favorable to a new patient. Yelp might even make it possible to only search for dental practices that have integrated scheduling. Such a filter means practices without the Yelp Platform features could become far less visible.
Much like with the old Yellow Pages where everyone was included but people who paid could have expanded more noticeable listings, Yelp Platform creates drastically different tiers among Yelp business profiles. From the perspective of patients this is a great feature, and Demandforce certainly stands to benefit from the partnership, but practices trying to succeed in competitive markets might see it differently.
It will be important to see how this new program rolls out and how much it will cost for dental practices to participate. Some might not want to be supporting Yelp in a financial way, but at the same time they might find not participating to be even more costly.