Questionnaire

Feel free to give us any feedback you wish. This is about giving us your opinion and all opinions are valuable to us, whether negative or positive.  Feel free to write overleaf if we haven’t given enough space

Your pet(s)

Species:                 Dog         Cat           Horse    Other (please specify)

If you have more than multiples of each please specify

Approximate age(s):

How many times have you been to the clinic for a consultation with your pet(s) in the last 12 months?

About us

1)Please rank  our clinic on the criteria listed below

Any thing you would like to add.....................................................................................................

2) Please rank  with numbers (1 being the most important) next to the improvements you think should have priority for the clinic

Clinic appearance

Price

Nutritional advice

Electronic communication (eg  email/text reminders)

Increased information availability (eg talks at the clinic, newsletters)

Better web site

Longer consultations

Puppy preschool and dog training classes

Longer consulting hours

Better access to vets

More merchandise

Any others?................................................................

3) If we were to have an information night/talks what topics would you like covered?

4) What is the best thing about coming to our clinic?

5) What is the worst thing about coming to our clinic?

6) Is there anything else you would like to add?

Results

On the 26/6/10 we sent out 150 of the questionaire above to clients who had been into the clinic in the last 12 months with a patient. It was done on a completely random and we enclosed a stamped self addressed envelope so it would be anonymous. We had 56 replies from a wide variety of people with a wide variety of patients and anywhere from one visit in the last year to one who said "too many to count".

With the first question was about what our clients thought of what we are doing well and what we are doing badly at the moment. We placed a value of 5 on excellent and 0 on terrible and as you can see the results were very good. Even the worst two categories, ie value and cleanliness, still had the equivalent of 9 out of ten people placing them as excellent. As you can see the top two were the vets and our compassion, which was gratefying. We expected our knowledge to rate higher than it did considering our post graduate studies and our interpretation on this was that maybe we arent communicating our knowledge sufficently. Although in an internet world it isnt so much the knowledge as the ability to interpret it and utilise it successfully and with compassion.  

Question 2 relates to what our clients think needs improving or at least what improvements should have priority. If you look at the table below the higher the score the more important the respondents thought it should be, ie price and nutritional advice was seen as the most important things we could improve and the web site was voted as the least important thing to improve. If you are a statistics guru you will notice in the graph that the average of all the scores should be 5 and it obviously isnt. This is because a number of people only rated three or four things and left the others blank.   

Better price wins again. I suspect it would always rate highly even if the our charges were nominal. Having said that it does cost money to deliver quality care and a number of respondents acknowledged that in their written responses.

The second highest improvement we could make would be to increase the amount of nutritional advice given. Again this took us by surprise in that in our opinion, for 90% of dogs if three quarters of their diet is made up of good quality dog food that is all they need. Cats are a little different in that they are a true carnivore but again if the majority of their diet is commercial food they are generally right. However, what is a good commercial food and what isnt and what can make up the minority of the diet? These are things we will try to cover more in things like newsletters etc.

Increased information is relatively easy to deliver. This web site has an enormous number of dog training videos in the video vault and a vast number of articles on drugs, behaviour, diseases nutrition etc in the library. Even so given the types of things people were interested in for question three and the fact that better access to the vets rated highly perhaps more face to face things like information nights or better transfer of information at the time of consultation such as referrals to relevant web sites, handouts or extended consultations.  

3) The types of things respondents wanted more information on are looking after elderly pets, training, feeding, native animal care, emergencies, pets for kids, breed deficiencies, civilising your pup, how vaccinations work, signs of being unwell, nutrition and home made diets, hehaviour problems, first aid and disciplining your dog.

4) The best things about the clinic were - waiting room size, parking, no waiting to do consult, web site, 24/7 – afterhours, professionalism, caring, never rushed, animals are relaxed, friendly, live close to the clinic, know that we love cats and dogs, kindness, getting the right advice, staff take time, Lisa and Geoff take time to listen, thorough, feel welcomed, fantastic communication/feedback, girls at front desk know me, efficient, long standing history, friendly and caring, service and hours, happy sympathetic at front desk, attention to detail, Perri and Lisa and a willingness to help. 

5) The worst thing about coming to the clinic fell into 2 basic categories - the fact that the only time you are here is when your animal is sick and the fact that you have to pay a bill when you do come in 

Suggestions

Pet toilets

VIP club inc email reminders, newsletter, discounts etc 

Comments

Friendly staff – know names

Inconsistent level of service

Again thankyou to all the respondents and if you didnt get a questionnaire feel free to copy and paste the one above or send us an email.