The Challenge
Valley Immediate Care is an urgent care clinic serving Southern Oregon. The company started as a small clinic seeing 20 patients per day and has grown to four urgent care centers and one occupational health center with more than 200 patients visiting daily.
But while Valley Immediate Care grew, its ratings suffered—hovering between 2.1 and 3.0 stars across its clinics. Brent Kell, CEO of Valley Immediate Care, says, “Our Google ratings just—they sucked—to say it frankly. It was really terrible.”
The Solution
Valley Immediate Care needed to improve ratings, and fast. It reached out to a reputation management company, but after a couple of months, poor ratings persisted. That’s when Valley Immediate Care implemented Podium. “It was really, really rapid and really pretty easy.” according to Kell.
Valley Immediate Care quickly started to see the impact of Interaction Management™. “Being able to manage a lot of different channels from one site was very attractive. We were learning to do a lot more text communication with patients,” said Kell, “it had to be a text to really be effective.”
The Result
Ratings improved rapidly across all Valley Immediate Care clinics. One location went from a 2.7 to a 4.4 star rating. Another office skyrocketed from a 2.1 to a 4.0. A third clinic went from a 3.0 to a 4.1. The final office shot up from a 2.7 to a 4.1.
Valley Immediate Care also uses Podium to reply to inbound conversations through Google My Business. “And a lot of those people are converting right from that Google landing page now,” Kell says. “They’re not even going to our webpage.”
With new competition entering the healthcare marketplace, ratings and engagement take an even larger role in Valley Immediate Care’s success. “Once there’s competition, that Google star rating is everything,” Kell says.
