Reputation & patient feedback

Turn happy visits into public reviews — and catch unhappy ones early

Reputation Management asks patients for feedback right after a completed visit, sends the happy ones to your public review profiles, and alerts your team the moment feedback is negative. It runs the whole loop for you: a patient finishes a visit, Hero sends them a short survey, and what happens next depends on how they answer. It lives under Admin → Reputation Management.

1. A visit is completed. When an eligible patient’s visit is marked complete, Hero schedules a feedback invitation — on the channel, at the time, and within the send window you’ve configured (see Delivery settings).
2. The patient answers a short survey. They get a branded email or text with a single link. It opens a mobile-friendly survey page — no login, app, or portal account — that takes under a minute (see What the patient sees).
3. Hero routes on the outcome. Each response is scored into one of three outcomes, and each outcome does something different:
   • Positive — the patient sees a thank-you screen with your public review links and can post a review in one tap (see Review links & outcomes).
   • Negative — the patient sees an acknowledgment that you take it seriously, and your team gets an alert to follow up (see Negative-feedback alerts).
   • Neutral — anything in between gets a simple thank-you and nothing else.

Open the workspace and set it up in order

The Reputation Management workspace is organized into four tabs — Overview, Survey, Delivery, and Routing & Review Links. You configure the survey and the sending rules first, try it on yourself, and only then switch it on, so nothing goes to a real patient until you’re happy with it.

Who can open it

Access is gated by a single dedicated permission. Organization owners hold it automatically. There is deliberately no general-admin shortcut — being an administrator alone doesn’t grant it — because this workspace controls what your practice publishes about itself and who gets nudged toward a public review. An organization administrator can grant it to a specific non-owner staff member as a reputation-only permission, without giving them anything else. If your practice requires clinical two-step verification, this workspace honors it, so you’ll be asked to verify before making changes.

The recommended setup order

The first time you save any settings, Hero creates a sensible starter survey for you, so you’re never staring at a blank page. From there, work the tabs left to right:

1. Build your survey. On the Survey tab, shape the questions, wording, and scoring that decide each outcome (see Build your survey).
2. Set delivery rules. On the Delivery tab, choose the channels, timing, send window, expiry, cooldown, and who is eligible (see Delivery settings).
3. Add your review destinations. On Routing & Review Links, list the public profiles you want positive patients sent to and choose who gets prompted (see Review links & outcomes).
4. Send yourself a demo. Before you enable anything, use the demo card to experience exactly what a patient will (see Demo the patient experience).
5. Turn it on. When it looks right, flip the master enable switch on the Delivery tab and Hero starts inviting eligible patients.

Design the survey and how it’s scored

The Survey tab is a template editor. A survey holds up to eight questions, and how a patient answers them decides whether their visit counts as positive, negative, or neutral. A live preview shows the survey exactly as a patient will see it, so you can check the wording and flow as you build.

Question types

Personalize the wording

Question text can include placeholders that Hero fills in automatically for each visit, so every survey reads as if it were written for that patient and provider. You can drop in the provider’s name, the provider’s last name, and your practice name — for example “How likely are you to recommend Dr. Lastname to a friend?”

Scoring & thresholds

You choose how the outcome is decided:

Either way, you set two thresholds — a positive cutoff and a negative cutoff. A score at or above the positive cutoff is a positive outcome; at or below the negative cutoff is a negative outcome; anything in between is neutral. Set them to match how demanding you want to be about who gets sent to public reviews and what counts as a red flag worth a staff alert.

Control who gets surveyed, how, and when

The Delivery tab decides when an invitation goes out, on what channel, and to whom. At the top is the master enable switch — the single control that turns the whole feature on or off.

Channels

Send by email, text message, or both. Whatever you choose, each patient’s own communication preferences and opt-outs are always honored on top of your setting — a patient who has opted out of texts won’t be texted even when SMS is on. Every text includes “Reply STOP to opt out.”

Timing & send window

1. Choose when to send after a visit. Either a delay in minutes after the visit is completed (for example an hour later, while it’s fresh), or a fixed time on a later day (for example 6:30 PM the next day).
2. Set a daily send window. Invitations only go out inside a window you set in your practice’s timezone. That window has to sit inside the platform-wide safe-contact hours of 08:00–20:30, and each patient’s local quiet hours and do-not-disturb preferences are respected as well — so nobody is messaged at an unreasonable hour.

Expiry, cooldown & eligibility

Preview the exact message

Two preview buttons show you the precise email and text a patient will receive, rendered with your branding and wording. The SMS preview also shows the message’s segment count, so you can see whether your text will send as one segment or more before you commit to it.

Point positive patients at the right review profiles

The Routing & Review Links tab is where you list the public profiles a satisfied patient can post to — Google, Yelp, Healthgrades, or anywhere else you keep a review page — and decide who gets asked.

Review destinations

1. Add each destination. Give it a Label the patient will recognize (for example “Google”) and a secure https link straight to your review page there. The link must be a plain HTTPS address with no query string and no fragment — anything carrying a ? or a # (a …/writereview?placeid=… link, or one ending #reviews) is rejected when you save. Use the short share link the review site gives you instead, such as a g.page/r/…/review link. You can list up to 40 destinations in total.
2. Choose its scope. A destination can be practice-wide (shown for every provider) or pinned to a specific provider. When a provider has their own link, that provider-specific link wins for that provider’s visits — so a patient is sent to the right doctor’s profile rather than a generic one.

Who gets prompted — the prompt mode

You decide which completing patients are shown your review links:

This tab also holds the negative-feedback alert policy that decides what happens when an outcome is negative — covered next in Negative-feedback alerts.

Catch unhappy patients and follow up

When a response scores as a negative outcome, Hero doesn’t just file it — it raises an alert so someone can reach out before a frustrated patient becomes a public one-star review. You set the alert policy on the Routing & Review Links tab and work the alerts on the Overview tab.

The alert policy

On a negative outcome, Hero raises an in-app alert (on by default — you can switch it off). You can additionally have it email selected staff so the right people hear about it without having to watch the workspace. The recipient picker lists the clinical staff who hold the reputation permission — so you can only route alerts to people already trusted with this workspace (see Access & first-time setup).

Working alerts on the Overview tab

The Overview tab is your dashboard: response volume and completion stats over a window you choose, the list of individual survey responses with each one’s score and outcome, and the negative-feedback alerts.

1. Spot the badge. An unacknowledged-alerts badge appears on the Overview tab and on the Reputation Management item in the Admin menu, so you can see there’s something to handle without opening the workspace.
2. Open the alert. Alert emails deep-link straight to the specific alert, so a recipient can click through from their inbox to the exact response rather than hunting for it.
3. Follow up, then acknowledge. Reach out to the patient however your practice handles service recovery, then acknowledge the alert to mark it handled and clear it from the badge count. Acknowledging is how the team signals an alert has been dealt with.

Send yourself the real thing before you launch

The Delivery tab has a Try the patient experience card that sends you the actual invitation a patient would get, built from your current settings — the best way to sanity-check your survey and wording before a single patient sees it.

1. Enter where to send it. Put in your own email address or mobile number, and optionally pick which provider to feature so the placeholders fill in with a real name.
2. Receive the real invitation. Hero sends you the genuine invitation message on that channel. Opening its link launches a live demo of the survey, generated from your current settings, with a clear Demo preview banner so it’s never mistaken for a real response.
3. Try it, then share it. Answer it as a patient would to see each outcome screen. You can replay the same link for 7 days, and a copy-link option lets you share the demo with colleagues for a second opinion.

The patient’s side of the survey

From the patient’s point of view this is fast and frictionless. After a completed visit they get a short, branded email or text; one tap opens a survey they can finish in under a minute; and the screen they land on afterward depends on how they answered.

1. The invitation arrives. A short message carrying your practice’s name, with a single link. No attachments, no account setup.
2. The survey opens. The link opens a mobile-friendly page dressed in your practice’s logo and colors — no login, app download, or portal account required. It’s built to take under a minute.
3. They submit, and see the right screen.
   • Positive — a thank-you with your review links, one tap from posting to the public review site.
   • Negative — an acknowledgment that your practice takes it seriously and will follow up, while your team gets the alert.
   • Neutral — a simple thank-you.

Links are single-use and time-limited

Each invitation carries a secure, single-use link that expires on the schedule you set (see Delivery settings). If a patient opens a link that has already been used or has expired, they see a friendly “no longer available” page rather than a broken screen — so there’s no way to submit twice or resurrect an old survey.

Common questions

Most “why didn’t this happen?” questions come down to an eligibility rule doing its job. Here’s how to read the usual ones.

Why wasn’t a patient surveyed?

A completed visit doesn’t always produce an invitation — by design. Check these first:

A patient completed the survey but didn’t see our review links.

That’s the prompt mode at work. If you’ve set positive only, patients with a neutral or negative outcome aren’t shown review links — only positive outcomes are. Switch the prompt mode to all patients if you want everyone who completes the survey to see them (see Review links & outcomes).

What happens to in-flight surveys if we turn the feature off?

Turning off the master switch cancels invitations that haven’t sent yet and deactivates links already delivered, so no more responses can come in until you turn it back on. Your past responses and stats stay intact on the Overview tab.