How to Use Client Feedback to Improve Your Clinic
Client feedback should be a driving force throughout your clinic to help recognize opportunities for improvement while also celebrating areas of success within your clinic walls.
“Veterinary practices should not fear client feedback and actually should solicit it regularly,” according to Katie Burns, writer for the AVMA News blog.
Below, we will cover three ways to collect client feedback to improve your clinic and provide the best care.
- Send post-appointment surveys
Gathering feedback from clients post-appointment is crucial for your clinic but is also extremely important for the clients.
In one of our previous blogs, we highlighted the benefits of sending a follow-up survey, including:
- Having happier clients.
- Getting honest feedback.
- Building your online review scores.
- Quickly addressing client problems.
- Seeing how you compare.
- Lowering staff stress.
Post-appointment surveys can help your clinic rise above the competition and show your clients that their thoughts and feedback are important to you and the care of the animals you treat.
2. Use standardized customer satisfaction metrics
Knowing your customer metrics is vital for managing feedback and assessing your current clinic’s pain points or success. The two best ways to gather customer metrics are with CSAT and NPS.
CSAT stands for customer satisfaction score and is used as a key performance indicator for customer service and product quality. You measure your CSAT through customer feedback. It is usually gathered by asking customers about their satisfaction with a service on a scale of 1 to 5.
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score, used in customer experience programs. This metric measures the loyalty of customers to your business. NPS scores are determined by a one-question survey ranging from -100 to +100, with higher scores indicating a more desirable outcome.
3. Act on the results
While collecting client feedback is essential, acting on the results from post-appointment surveys and customer metrics is substantially more important.
The best ways to act on these results include:
- Prioritizing changes based on impact and ease of implementation.
- Creating a plan.
- Getting buy-in from key stakeholders.
- Implementing the plan.
- Analyzing the impact of change by monitoring results before and after.
- Adjusting as needed.
“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. If no system exists for reviewing the status quo and implementing change, a survey is not the right tool for your practice at this time.” according to Bash Halow, LVT and writer for DVM360.
Acting on results coming directly from clients shows their opinions and feedback matter and the clinic is willing to do what is necessary to provide the best care possible.
