PRACTICE MANAGEMENT
Article reprinted with the permission of VETERINARY MEDICINE, Jan 06, 2015
VETERINARY ECONOMICS is a copyrighted publication of Advanstar.
Communications inc. All rights reserved.
Build a Better Veterinary
Client Survey
Tips and tricks for getting the most out of your practice's survey.
By Bash Halow, CVPM, LVT
Tell me if this sounds familiar. Business is flat and
appointments are down, so somebody at the practice
decides to do a client satisfaction survey. Here are survey
questions you usually ask: Did the person who answered
the phone sound friendly? Was your wait time too long?
Did someone review your pet’s medication with you and
answer all your questions?
The responses come in and the news is good. More than
90 percent of clients surveyed “strongly agreed” in the
positive. You guys rock!
Or do you? What about the other 8 percent? The survey
responses indicate that one of the respondents was
“extremely dissatisfied.” You share the stats with the
team at a meeting and someone in the group knows the
“crackpot” who gave you the bad marks. This client has
been coming to the practice for years and every time she
walks in the door, it’s with a new complaint. She would
gripe if her ice cream were cold. As a group, you agree
she’s a grump and her responses don’t count. Another of
the respondents was “dissatisfied” with his wait time and
his discharge instructions. Sally at the desk knows exactly
who this is. He came last Tuesday when the practice was
slammed! He doesn’t count either. You’re able to explain
away each of the remaining bad reviews: Sometimes stuff
happens… what are you going to do?
The following weeks’ results are similar; most times
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clients are happy and a few times they’re not. The positive
comments lend credibility to the notion that you are the
best. The negative ones underscore the paradoxes of
general practice: If we’re here to help our clients whenever
they need us, then sometimes our client service will be
uneven. You start to sense that the responses from the
survey tell you what you already knew—that, for the most
part, you’re pretty good. However, you still don’t know
why business is down and you haven’t figured out how to
take your client care to the next level.
Surveys can be excellent tools, but only if they‘re crafted,
administered and evaluated well. Here are some tips I’ve
picked up over the years that help determine whether my
surveys are working.
Know exactly what you want to know
Unless you own or work for an extremely large veterinary
company, you don’t need a survey to tell you that your
appointments run overtime, that your team members
put clients on hold too often or that sometimes clients
are given short shrift. Everybody at your practice knows
the solution to these problems. So asking questions like,
“Did the client care representative tell you his name?” are
neither helpful in qualifying client care nor improving it.
In almost all cases, veterinary practices are served best
by understanding whether doctors and team members
are living up to the hospital’s mission goals. Ask yourself