If you’re not collecting and acting on client feedback, you’re putting your clinic’s success up to chance.

Debbie Boone of 2 Manage Vet Consulting, a practice manager for 23 years and consultant since 2008, told AVMA during an interview, “The client is our source of income. And we need to look at them as somebody that we need to not only just satisfy but actually delight when they come into our hospital. And until we start asking questions about what they really want, our offerings are all assumptions that we’re doing what they’re asking.”

Boone is right. Collecting feedback is the only way to judge how you are performing in the eyes of your clinic’s loyal clientele. Collecting feedback may not be at the top of your clinic’s mind, but it should be. Below, we have outlined why collecting feedback is vital for your clinic.

• Make your clients feel heard
• Solidify your clinic’s strengths
• Address areas for improvement
• Create a better client experience
• Increase compliance

Clients are the most critical part of a successful clinic. They drive revenue, determine compliance with care plans, and monitor their pets’ health and behaviors outside the clinic.

Keeping your clients happy is key to building loyalty and keeping them engaged with their pets’ care. One way to keep them happy is to communicate with them and make them feel heard.

Clients want to know you take their concerns seriously. Not only will collecting feedback and acting on the results improve the client experience and boost retention, it will also ensure clients are more likely to encourage other pet parents to visit your clinic.

Collecting feedback will help you identify the strengths that you can lean into as a clinic. An excellent way to identify your strengths is by following up with clients who indicate in a survey that they enjoyed their visit with your clinic. Ask them to describe what they liked about the experience, so you can make sure to replicate that in future visits.

Once you establish your clinic’s strengths, making improvements will be much easier.

Once you’ve collected feedback and solidified your clinic’s strengths, it’s time to address your areas for improvement. But how you handle this process is critical for your team’s morale, as well as the client experience.

As Bash Halow, LVT, CVPM, a practice consultant and owner of Halow Consulting, wrote in an article on DVM360, “Using negative survey answers to underscore your assertions to the team that they provide lousy service is not only the wrong use of a survey, it’s a surefire way to incite mutiny. Something constructive must be done with the results, whether it’s a review of the answers by the management team, a committee within the practice, or the whole team.”

Gather the results of your surveys, and find common themes around what your clients hope you can do better. Then, you can make the necessary changes to help with your clinic-client relationship.

As you implement changes that highlight your strengths and improve upon your weaknesses, you’ll provide a better client experience that leads to greater loyalty. Letting your clients’ feedback make a helpful difference in your clinic will encourage current clients to stay while also increasing your appeal with new clients.

Using surveys to collect customer feedback will help you continuously improve your approach to communication and clinical recommendations. After all, your clients know what motivates them to adhere to treatment plans better than anyone else.

Using their feedback about what does and doesn’t work for them will improve the success of your clinic and your relationship with your clients.