Client Relationship Management: How to Better Define Key Patient Advocacy Opportunities

What do King Charles III and Ozzy Osbourne have in common? Well they are both males, born in 1948 who live in castles and have held Princely titles: Prince of Wales and The Prince of Darkness. In marketing, Personas are often used as a way to generically determine product/market fit. However, as ole Ozzy and King Chuck point out personas no matter how niche are not always a great one size fits all solution for creating a well defined target audience.

Not Another TLA!

AKA (also known as) who needs yet another TLA (three letter acronym)? We have a lot of three letter acronyms in veterinary. Like with any profession, we like to cloak ourselves in them. So you're forgiven if until this point you had thought CRM stood for Chronic Renal Management or Clinical Review Meetings! In this case however, CRM stands for Customer (or client) Relationship Management. But, how do we better define key patient advocacy opportunities and maximize both the client support we're able to offer and scale up our clinic's growth with the use of these three simple letters?

What is Client Relationship Management?

Client Relationship Management or Customer Relationship Management (CRM), is a widely used business tool for managing interactions and relationships with both existing and potential customers. And you may know some non veterinary specific, very generic offerings such as HubSpot and Salesforce; providing sales and marketing contact management, automations and analytics reporting. And yep, we know we've mentioned words such as 'business', 'customer management' and 'sales', all very dirty words in the pet health space! Very few of us came into veterinary medicine knowing that we wanted to work at this intersection of, businesses and customers and management and sales.

The Veterinary Innovation Council estimates that the average pet owner encounters two pet issues per pet per month. So 24 issues per pet per year, and only two of those issues are addressed by veterinary expertise, which means 92% of ALL pet issues go unaddressed by the people best placed to address them; the local veterinary team. And it's not to say that the local veterinary clinic should be dealing with all 24 pet issues. There are likely to be issues in there that they don't want to deal with that are better addressed, at a pet shop or a groomer or wherever else it might be. But is 2 the right number? Is just 8% of all pet issues the right percentage? And is it the right two issues? Of the 24, are the two that are presented to us the correct two that should be presented. In clinic we often get caught up in relatively trivial and/or low priority issues that take us away from our key areas of true expertise and the animals that need them. Why? Well, normally because there are infinite friendly games of telephone tennis to participate in or quick fire rounds of tick or nipple to mediate? And no offence but that's normally because in our over stretch, driven by an inability to see down a phone line and determine whether this next call is a dog bleeding out or simply a lovely, new local pet owner asking for directions, flea meds, nail clips, opening times. And so without actively choosing to we inevitably place pet owners in the critical thinking seat, making them responsible for determining what and how many of their pet's health care needs are surfaced to us.

How Can CRM Help Better Define Key Patient Advocacy Opportunities?

A good CRM system will help you to take your existing patient population and be proactive about what you think the client (pet owners) should be doing for those pets, so that we're not left being reactive to the issues that are brought to us by the pet owners. One way to think about this is rather than thinking about a marketing funnel, think about the whole of the veterinary clinic as a funnel, where you have inputs coming in at the top, the clinic systems and processes, and then outcomes being delivered out of the bottom. Currently, those inputs are whatever the pet owner presents on behalf of their pets. But we can think about it more holistically. Take the average clinic, database of 3,000 active patients per year. And they'll go through their systems and processes and generate some kind of patient outcomes, financial outcomes, team outcomes, client outcomes, environmental outcomes, community outcomes. And we can break this down in an even more tangible sense for you and your veterinary team, those 3,000 pets can represent:

•Three millennia of parasite prevention •54,000 nails to get trodden on or caught on •3550 litres of blood •420,000 litres of urine (almost enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool) •111,600 teeth to scale and polish or get bitten by •200 tons of fecal sampling opportunities •6,000 kidneys to look after •853,800 bones to keep intact

And the question we want the veterinary teams to ask themselves is what are they doing with all of that? What are the chances that any one of those bones will be x-rayed this year? What are the chances that blood will be sampled? What are the chances that that pet will get a dental? Like what is the penetration? What percentage of, what is the likelihood when that pet walks through the doors of your veterinary clinic that they will have got a dental. And that's what CRM is going to help the clinics move the needle on.

It's really nice to be working in the veterinary field because we're dealing with under medicalized consumers of healthcare. And so sometimes having to push for things. No veterinary professional has ever made the case that we are doing too many dentals for pets. In fact, the American Animal Hospital association recommends that every cat and dog over the age of two should essentially get an annual dental. And a lot of pets go their whole lives without ever having received dental care. So the ability to turn tables on this stuff can only improve the quantity and quality of life for the pets under our care.

I think most of us are sick of hearing that millennials are the rising pet owner population - they've risen, they ARE the biggest pet owning population! And as the largest pet owning population they want curation followed by informed consumption. They need to be carried along on a journey with multiple touch points before deciding. Think of CRM as a champion of these touch points making sure what is needed is provided.

With a CRM you can have predefined audience templates, filtered templates by age, birthday, species, breed, status, weight, products purchased, services used, latest appointment type and date. For example we could use CRM to target specific pets (breed, age) who haven't had a dental in the last 12 months. You could use this to send out a dental advocacy campaign and even extend the patient journey beyond the clinic. We know from our own learnings that clinics using PetsApp CRM see results immediately afterwards. In fact we've had reports of clinics having a 4x increase in dental procedures.

See CRM in Action

Our very own CS Manager, Claire Cameron RVN has created a full CRM run through so that you can see just how well defined PetsApp CRM is and how easy it is to create your own filters or simply put our pre populated templates into action.

Watch now!

Sign up to PetsApp and join clinics such as Westport Vets who are booking 3x as many appointments through PetsApp integrated appointment booking each week than they ever did via their previous appointment booking service provider, and this doesn't even include the additional appointments being booked via chat! Let's PetsApp Together.