Even the best vet practices have room to improve their customer experience – just ask Dr Susan Bibby, owner of MyVet Strathfieldsaye in Bendigo, Victoria. Since it opened 7 years ago the clinic has been dedicated to delivering a superior customer experience, but when Dr Bibby spotted Vet CX’s Customer Care Insights (CCI) Program, she was motivated to make CX at her clinic even better.
MyVetStrathfieldsaye is now ranked 1st in the CCI Program, recognising the clinic’s achievement of the highest and most consistent results of all practices in the program over the last 12 months. Vet practices participating in the CCI program receive weekly mystery shopping calls to assess customer experience and are given a monthly report on how they rank against their competitors.
Dr Bibby shares her learnings about getting her team on board with the CCI program, their most improved areas and her tips to getting the most out of the experience:
“One of the key things I learned from the program was that CX really does start from that initial phone call.
“When our team were answering our calls initially the person on the line might ask ‘how much is it for X treatment’ and we would give them the price and then that’s it – hang up.
“But the CCI program has given our team the skills to assess what the person on the other line needs and given us the confidence to tell them more about our services and build rapport. So when they hang up the phone they go “gee, that was really nice” and even if they don’t book that time, they will remember that experience later when they are looking for help again.
“We did a few simple things to really help the team feel comfortable with the program and get the most out of it.
“Number one: Set a benchmark. We actually received some of the VetCX mystery shopping calls before we went through the program, so we had those calls as a benchmark. After the program, the team could look back on how they performed and see that improvement.
“Number two: As an owner, I participated in the program alongside my staff. Because our clinic is quite small and we don’t have a designated receptionist, our whole team had to do it – that included me. At first there was some apprehension about being monitored so everyone doing it really helped cement that feeling that we were all working on CX together and that it is really about improving things for the customer. We’ve even got a little bit of competition now around who can get the best numbers!
“Number three: When things went wrong, we were empathetic about it. People do have their off days – I remember one call with one of my team members who is normally fabulous. One day she dropped the ball entirely on the call. It turned out that day she had just helped with a particularly emotionally taxing euthanasia of a pet so her head just wasn’t in the right space.
“Overall the program has been invaluable to us – we get really good feedback. You can’t get that feedback any other way and you can’t measure it yourself. If your team are on board, and see it as a positive, competitive thing, then it can only be great for your business.
Everything is getting so much more complex all the time, and this program just breaks it down into the key areas we need to focus on to make sure the client gets a great experience.”
The Vet CX Customer Care Insights program allows practices to discover what customers are experiencing when they contact a practice by phone. Members of the program are mystery shopped each month and are asked typical questions that pet owners would generally ask. Practice owners/managers are provided with a recording of the calls and a report benchmarking each practice with the State/National averages, as well as other vet practices in the local area. Click the link to find out more here.
