There are numerous ways a large organisation can diminish your client listing. Just offering loss leaders like 'free vaccination' is enough to persuade some pet owners to change vets.
Even though it's well known within the profession that the cost of the free offer is recovered later a freebie is a tempting offer. This strategy has had a dramatic impact on small and medium practices. When one can not directly match such 'marketing ploys' there are other methods one can use to compete.
Customer loyalty is not 'really' price dependent.
Saving money, gaining new clients
The level of service you can offer plays an important part in the pet owners decision and it offers opportunities for independent veterinary surgeries to improve loyalty and attract new business.
The 'trust factor' is a vital ingredient. A general improvement in the quality and quantity of content at your website is clearly not enough alone but it does add weight to many other aspects. For instance event planning should always include features at your website where pet owners can not only read about forthcoming classes, seminars or your own 'special offers' but also review previous events. This over time builds a body of work that can become a valuable resource. A powerful motivator in the pet owners choice of clinic.
Even without bespoke applications the systems we build are capable of business management. There are thousands of third party software packages, nearly all at very reasonable cost which can be added to your website to enhance its capabilities. Auto-response to pet owner enquiries is a great use of this technology.
A simple but useful example, if you would like to offer online prescription orders, we can program the website to read the date and the date. When the form appears it offers the customer a choice of which day their order will be ready to collect, it can even calculate holidays and factor these. The pet owner has clear and accurate information without the need of a staff member. This may free your staff for clinical duties. Of course that is a simple example but this type of clerical work however important, is not profitable. Freeing your staff to help customers and build relationships is a major factor in customer retention. More staff time here can pay dividends.
Complex business management is also possible. As a general rule specialist veterinary software is limited to it's own network and secured so interaction between your website and internal software is usually limited. However in most cases there can be 'some' cross-connectivity even if the website is used as an initial interface, information on forms submitted at your website can be recorded to a database and formatted for import into various other packages.
This means of course your staff do not have to re-type information, they may not even have to cut and paste. They could simply 'import' with a few clicks and use the information at will on an internal system. So it is possible to use one of our systems to reduce the practice overheads and streamline clerical procedures.