Do you think that extending your consultations from 15 or 20 mins is doing your clients a service or a disservice?
The answer may surprise you and may be losing your clients.
Watch the video, read the transcript or listen to the audio to discover the answer and why
Click Here to listen to the Podcast
See below to read the Transcription:
How Important Is Waiting Time For Your Clients
Hi, it’s Diederik Gelderman here.
Do you or anyone else in your team think you’re doing your clients a favour by extending that consultation time?
For example, having a client there for half an hour or forty minutes, so you have time to fully investigate their case rather than just a ‘standard’ fifteen minutes? Do you run long consults deliberately?
The fact is you’re not doing your clients any favours, and to some degree, they’re resenting you for that.
Let me explain why.
Studies show that the average client allows about an hour or an hour and a half in their day to go and visit their veterinarian or their doctor or their dentist, etc.
They allow a certain amount of travel time, a certain amount of wait time, a certain amount of exam room time, and then obviously the trip home.
That’s typically an hour to an hour to an hour and a half. They’re busy people, they’ve got other things to do with their day, whether that be shopping, getting back to work, picking up their kids from school or attending meetings.
So, when your practice mistakenly believes that “Oh, I’ll give this client a lot more value, we’ll investigate this pet fully while the pet and the client are here. We’ll keep that client rather than fifteen minutes, we’ll keep them for thirty or forty minutes, they’ll really appreciate all that.”
The fact is they’re not going to appreciate it, and quite a few clients are going to resent it and be reluctant to come back.
Let me suggest that develop another strategy for managing a situation where you need a longer exam, you know, to work up a skin problem or ear problem or whatever it happens to be.
Ask the client, “Do you have anything else to do? Is it okay with you to do this now — this is going to take an extra fifteen minutes, is that okay?”
And if they say “Yep”, then cool, great, you’ve got the green light, and then you go ahead.
If you don’t get that green light, if they “umm, and ahh,” or say “No”, then find another strategy.
Either admit their pet for the day and do the work up without the client here, if that’s okay with them or get the pet back and get the client back on another day when you can finish off that investigation.
Please, don’t mistakenly believe that you are doing the client a favour by keeping them an extra fifteen or twenty minutes and thinking that they appreciate it.
In fact, you’re really going to rub some clients up the wrong way, but they’re not going to tell you so when they never come back, you won’t even notice.
See you on the next video. Bye.
If you enjoyed the tips and the clues and the strategies in this video, and if you are a practice owner, or practice manager or an aspiring owner interested in any aspect of growing your practice and making it more profitable, may I suggest that you go to my website www.turbochargeyourpractice.com and register there to receive my newsletter.
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Bye.