What Separates Veterinary Practices XXXIII
What is going to be the key ingredient that separates practices that have success and ones that do not as we head out of the recession and into new times? I believe that veterinary medicine, as we know it, is about to make some very significant adjustments, just as human medicine did years ago. Clients are going to demand certain services and demand more affordability than ever before. Clients are used to seeing discounts everywhere they go and even if they look at their pet as a family member, they still want the best for less. Look at what happened to optometrist’s years ago. They went from charging inflated prices for glasses and giving away exams to losing the sale of glasses and going back to exams. As veterinarians, we need to wake up to the fact that anyone can give vaccinations in the public’s eye and anyone can sell a product. What would your practice look like if you lost vaccine and product sales?
To combat these changes, we as veterinarians have to focus on customer service. Everyone talks about it, but listen closely to a group of veterinarians talking and they really have no idea what customer service truly means. I was just at a meeting of large clinics and we were talking about this subject. One gentleman said that he would “show” his clients if they wanted to purchase their pet’s medication through an online pharmacy, he would make their life miserable and charge them a prescription fee. Although there is nothing wrong with a prescription fee, take a look at his attitude: I will “show” them, when actually they will “show” him as they go elsewhere. Another one said that if a client calls after 4:00, even if the clinic is open until 6:00, since it slows down at 4:00, they will not get vaccines at his clinic, and even if the animal is sick and wants to be seen, he will refuse and make them go elsewhere. That is not only poor customer service but also extremely poor business because now not only does he not get vaccines, but he gets no business at all.
I never understood where veterinarians got the attitude that their clients owed them something. I always thought that I owed the client everything for giving me the opportunity to service their pets and put that much trust in my staff and me. The veterinarians that truly take care of their clients and provide what their clients want will be the successful veterinarians of the future. It is time for veterinarians to lose their ego and understand that this is business and we better treat people as they want or they will find someone that does. When the two gentlemen were telling the group of how tough they were going to get, I just laughed to myself and thought: I am in the same area of town, so I guess as you “show” them, we will take care of them.
Why do some veterinary clinics run so smoothly and others seem to be so chaotic all of the time? Some clinics can handle many people at once and others can only handle one or two at a time. Space definitely has something to do with it, plus patient flow and flow of charts has a lot to do with the amount of congestion in a clinic, along with the attitude of the veterinarians.
