A viral post, then a flood of reviews from people who were never patients
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After a viral local social media post misrepresented a single interaction at our clinic, our urgent care was hit with a rapid burst of one star reviews, many from accounts well outside our area who had obviously never walked through our doors.
Urgent care sees people on their worst days, often frightened or in pain, and we cannot control outcomes or moods, let alone relitigate a busy shift in a public reply. It was a stark lesson in how a reputation built one patient at a time can be swamped in a day by people who were never patients.
My staff, who had done nothing wrong and had in fact handled a hard situation well, took the pile-on personally, and morale sagged for a couple of weeks. I gathered the team to remind them that a coordinated online swarm is not a referendum on their care, which is true but only partly consoling.
I spent hours flagging the clearly fake reviews, submitting the same forms over and over until it felt futile. Google eventually trimmed a few as suspicious, but the average stayed dented, and averages do not bounce back quickly.