I’ve been holding staff meetings in veterinary hospitals for 10 years.

That is a lot of monthly staff meetings.

It occurred to me perhaps others could use some of this information for their own meetings in the same way that I used this information from where ever I stole it from.

You can find Part Two on Team Building Exercises and Games here, and Part Three on Communication Tools here. Part Zero, on general meeting structure and etiquette, can be found here. 

I’m envisioning this being an ongoing resource for those who have to come up with topics for discussion or team building. I have removed a lot of the hospital specific information and so please feel free to add, rearrange, and generally change the information to suit your practice, or business.  I’m going to try and keep similar subjects together. This week we are looking at customer service. If you end up using some of this I’d love to see your slide decks or presentations.

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The Client Centered Practice

Why should we care about clients?

We are here for the pets…

To help pets we have to invest in happy clients.

We are here to cater to Clients Our job is to make our clients experience exceptional and therefore to return.

1st impressions are formed in 7 secs. Be Likable: attitude, smile, eye contact, raise eyebrows, shake hands, lean in but stay 2′ away.

Ask clients why they named their pet what they named them. Open ended questions help boost engagement.

Be complimentary, thank clients for trusting you / us with their pet.

Any time you surprise clients you build customer loyalty. If you do something nice for them they will do something nice for us.

Tell clients stories about their pet. Make sure clients know what you do to make pets comfortable.

Upset clients are a chance for us to shine: “What I will do is…” “We appreciate your feedback…” “Let me see what I can do about that.”

Use the pets name in the conversation. Do not refer to he, she, or it. If you must refer to the sex… GET IT RIGHT!

Internal Customer Service

How we interact with each other is at least as important as how we interact with clients.

Every time we do not deliver excellent customer service to a co-worker there is a client, or patient, at the other end who is not getting good customer service.

Always try to view things from our client’s perspective.

A client’s reality is not ours.

Our clients should never suffer because internal issues.

Phone Based Customer Service

Every client who calls wants to come in.

Every client will call other places if we let them.

It is difficult for owners to evaluate the quality of veterinary services. They can’t use logic to evaluate services they only know how we make them feel.

55% of communication is visual.

7% of communication is content.

38% is how things are said.

On the phone we are already handicapped because of the lack of visual.

How we say things is doubly important.

The ROI of awesome customer service (15:00 minute mark to 20:25 minute mark)

Setting Customer Expectations

We don’t know what our clients are expecting.

Some vet hospitals do things differently than others.

Clients get upset because we do not do what they thought we should do.

A customer has a certain expectation of customer service when they visit Wal-Mart or a McDonalds.

A customer has a different expectation of the level of customer service when they visit Nordstrom or Starbucks.

A customer who goes to Nordstrom and get’s a Wal-Mart level of service…

(Give examples of online reviews and client expectation mismatch)

Zappos charge for shipping, and clients expect to be charged for shipping.

However, occasionally giving away free shipping to a client makes the client feel valued and grateful.

If we let client’s know what is going to happen and then we exceed those expectations they will love us for it.