Independent practices should use the next two years to rethink the client journey

TL;DR

• Owners will have more information and more ways to compare practices before they make contact.
• Independent practices can use that shift to win new clients, fill more capacity and make their independence and service more visible.
• Better connected technology can remove a large amount of admin while also making new customer journeys possible.
• This article offers concrete recommendations about how to do this.

This follows what public reaction to veterinary reform tells independent practices about the market ahead. The short version is that owners already accept scrutiny, and they are much less convinced the remedies will cut what they pay. The question for a practice is what it does with that opening.

The next couple of years will change how people choose veterinary practices. More information will be available before an owner picks up the phone, and comparison will become increasingly normal. Prices, ownership, services and availability will be easier to find, which means more of the decision will take place before anyone in the practice knows the prospective client exists.

Independent practices have a lot to gain from that environment. Many already have the things owners say they value: local ownership, clinical autonomy, continuity and a more personal relationship with the people looking after their animals. The difficulty has often been making those advantages visible before somebody becomes a client. A more transparent market gives independents a better chance to do that, while modern practice technology can remove a substantial amount of the administrative work currently needed to support the relationship.

There is a revenue opportunity in attracting more of the right clients, converting more of the demand already reaching the practice, making unused clinical capacity easier to sell and keeping clients for longer. There is a cost opportunity in reducing the manual work that still sits around bookings, estimates, prescriptions, billing and follow-up.

That makes this a useful time to look at the practice as a whole rather than treating the website, marketing, PMS, booking system and client communications as separate projects.

Audit the customer journey properly

Most practice owners know what they want the client experience to feel like. Fewer have actually gone through it from the outside recently.

Start there. Search for the practice as a new owner would, use the website on a phone, try to find prices, check how obvious ownership is, see how easy it is to understand the services and try to book without using any knowledge that only somebody inside the practice would have. Do the same with two or three local competitors. The differences are often more revealing than another internal meeting about the website.

Then look at what real users actually do. Tools such as Microsoft Clarity can show where people click, how far they scroll, where they hesitate and which pages they abandon. That gives a much better view of the customer journey than judging the site from the home page or relying on traffic numbers alone. If prospective clients repeatedly reach a service page and disappear before booking, or if they ignore a piece of information the practice considers important, there is something useful to investigate.

The same audit should continue beyond the website. What happens after somebody clicks Book? How much information do they have to re-enter? Does the confirmation answer the questions they are likely to have? Is the first visit consistent with what the website promised? Does the owner understand what happens next when they leave?

Independent practices are well placed to improve this because they can make changes quickly and shape the experience around the way they actually want to work. A regular customer-journey audit, backed by real behaviour rather than assumptions, will usually uncover opportunities to improve conversion, reduce friction and make the practice easier to choose before any extra money is spent on acquisition.

Make booking part of the sales process

Once somebody has decided they like the practice, it should be easy to become a client. There are still plenty of veterinary websites where the final step is a phone number or a form asking somebody to wait for a callback. Every extra step gives the prospect time to carry on looking and creates another task for reception.

Live booking works best when it reflects the diary the practice actually runs. The owner should be taking a slot the practice genuinely wants to sell rather than creating a request that somebody later has to repair. There is real revenue in making suitable capacity immediately bookable because a quiet clinic session cannot be sold retrospectively.

Registration should flow through in the same way. If the owner has already entered their details, reception should be checking them rather than retyping them. These are small savings individually, but repeated across thousands of interactions they create meaningful staff capacity and allow growth without administrative headcount rising at the same rate.

Get owners bought into treatment beyond the simple number

Greater price transparency will make it easier for owners to compare practices, but price alone tells them very little about the quality of the care they are buying. Independent practices have an opportunity to make the clinical value much more visible, particularly where a case is going to involve several decisions or a longer course of treatment.

A good consultation should leave the owner understanding what the vet thinks is happening, what they are trying to establish, how the proposed treatment fits together and what is likely to happen next. That gives the owner a care pathway they can understand and participate in rather than a succession of appointments, tests and charges that only make sense from inside the practice.

This is also where professional expertise can become much more tangible. The value of an experienced vet is not simply the consultation itself or the ability to perform a procedure. It is the judgement involved in deciding which problems matter, which investigations are worthwhile, when further intervention is justified and when it is not. Much of that thinking is invisible to the client unless the practice makes an effort to communicate it.

Where there are legitimate alternatives, they can form part of the same conversation. The owner may choose a more comprehensive diagnostic route, a more conservative approach or something in between depending on the clinical circumstances and their own priorities. Being involved in that decision makes it easier to understand why the chosen pathway is appropriate and builds confidence in the vet who is guiding it.

Technology can help preserve that experience beyond the consultation. A treatment plan can give the owner a clear record of the agreed pathway, the important decisions and what comes next, while the practice retains the clinical detail behind it. Follow-up then becomes a continuation of a plan the owner already understands rather than another isolated transaction.

For independent practices, this is a much stronger way to compete than trying to win every comparison on price. The practice can use transparency to get someone through the door, then demonstrate through the quality of the clinical experience why they should stay.

Explain the clinical value of dispensing, not just the price

Medicine is one of the easiest parts of a veterinary bill for an owner to compare because the product looks identical wherever it is bought. If the practice charges more than an online pharmacy, the natural conclusion is that the owner is paying more for the same thing.

That misses some of the clinical value a practice can provide when it remains involved in supplying the medicine. The prescribing vet can see what has actually been dispensed, when it was supplied and what the animal should currently be taking. Dose changes, repeat requests and monitoring can all remain connected to the clinical record rather than depending on the owner remembering what was ordered elsewhere and when.

For some clients, that visibility and continuity may be worth paying for. An owner managing several medicines, a chronic condition or a treatment that is likely to change over time may reasonably prefer the practice to remain closely involved, even where the medicine itself could be bought more cheaply elsewhere. The practice needs to explain that value rather than assume the client will infer it from a higher price.

Written prescriptions should still be straightforward for owners who want them, and there is no benefit in making the external route unnecessarily difficult. The opportunity for an independent practice is to make the choice intelligible: buying elsewhere may reduce the cost of the medicine, while obtaining it through the practice can keep supply, monitoring and the clinical record more closely connected.

Handled well, this gives the practice a much better basis for competing than trying to defend a price difference in isolation. The conversation becomes about how the owner wants their animal's ongoing medication managed and how much they value the practice remaining directly involved in that care.

Work out the cost of all the wasted time staff take for granted

Most veterinary practices have accumulated processes rather than designed them. Over time, the team ends up moving information between systems, re-entering data and manually carrying work from one stage to the next. A five-minute task carried out fifty times a week consumes more than 200 hours a year, so the cost of these small inefficiencies can become substantial.

The more useful response is to give the practice control over how its workflows operate. Vetrics includes a customisable automation builder so an independent can decide what should happen when events occur inside the practice rather than relying on fixed workflows imposed by the software. That can remove repetitive admin, but it also lets the owner shape the experience around the way the practice actually wants to work.

The same flexibility can support very different models. A practice can build more proactive follow-up, stronger nurse-led care, better digital self-service or a more structured client journey without waiting for a software vendor to decide that everybody should work that way. That is particularly relevant to independents because their ability to operate differently from the large groups is part of the proposition.

It also affects recruitment and retention. Vets and nurses spend a large part of their working day inside the PMS, so poor software becomes part of the job whether the owner intends it or not. A practice that removes clerical work, gives staff better tools and allows workflows to be improved around the team can make itself more attractive to good people as well as more efficient to run.

Let clients participate more actively in the care of their animal

One of the biggest opportunities in veterinary customer experience is to bring owners closer to what is happening clinically rather than treating them as people who receive updates at intervals.

That can start inside the practice. If an animal is hospitalised, appropriate video access or regular visual updates can make the owner feel much more connected to the care being provided. They can see progress for themselves, understand what the team is observing and feel involved in a period that is otherwise largely hidden from them.

The same principle extends beyond the hospital. Home monitoring can allow owners to contribute useful information between visits, whether that is weight, appetite, mobility, breathing, recovery after surgery or another measure relevant to the case. That information can flow back into the clinical record and give the team a better picture of what is happening outside the consulting room.

Used properly, this can improve clinical decision-making as well as the client relationship. Owners spend far more time with the animal than the practice ever can, and giving them structured ways to contribute can surface changes earlier and make follow-up more informed.

It also changes how the relationship feels. The owner becomes part of the care pathway rather than somebody waiting for the next phone call. For independent practices, that can be a powerful extension of the continuity and personal involvement they already offer, particularly when the technology makes that participation easy without creating another administrative burden for the team.

Make follow-up part of the care pathway

Follow-up should be designed into the care pathway at the point the clinical plan is agreed, with the right actions scheduled for the right people rather than left as notes that somebody has to remember later.

A practice might decide that a particular pathway requires a nurse check at a set interval, a clinician review after a result, a client update at home and escalation if defined information comes back outside the expected range. Those steps can be built into an automation so the appropriate staff member receives the task when it is due and the client knows what is happening without reception having to coordinate every stage manually.

Vetrics' customisable automation builder is useful here because practices can create workflows around their own clinical standards rather than accepting a generic sequence imposed by the software. Different conditions, procedures and types of patient can have different pathways, with the automation carrying the administrative parts while clinicians remain responsible for the decisions.

For the owner, this makes the care feel organised and continuous. They know what happens next, who is following up and when they should expect to hear from the practice. For the team, it removes the need to keep those commitments alive through memory, inboxes and handwritten task lists.

That allows independents to offer highly attentive follow-up without creating the staffing burden that would normally come with delivering it manually.

Attribute revenue from first discovery through the client lifecycle

Independent practices should expect proper attribution from their marketing rather than accepting reports built around clicks, calls and form submissions. The useful question is whether a particular source produced a client, what that client went on to spend with the practice, whether they returned and how valuable the relationship became over time.

That is one of the advantages of connecting VetsCompared, our managed practice websites and Vetrics. The acquisition source can be captured at first discovery and carried through booking, registration and into the client record, so the attribution does not disappear once somebody becomes a patient. A VetsCompared visit, Google Ads click or website enquiry can ultimately be connected with appointments, treatment, revenue and retention.

That gives practice owners a much clearer view of customer acquisition. They can see which campaigns produce registrations rather than traffic, which services bring in clients who stay, whether a particular town or treatment category is worth additional spend, and how acquisition cost compares with the value subsequently generated by the client.

For an independent practice with a finite marketing budget, this is much more useful than conventional agency reporting. Spend can follow actual commercial performance across the client lifecycle, while weak campaigns can be cut before more money is wasted. It also makes VetsCompared and the practice website accountable for the same thing as the PMS: whether they help create valuable, lasting client relationships.

Build the practice you want to own, or sell, in five years

Practice owners should think about technology in the context of the return they want from the business. A practice that can acquire clients predictably, use clinical capacity well, retain those clients and grow without adding administrative cost at the same rate should produce better margins than one where growth means adding more people and more manual process.

Acquisition and the PMS increasingly belong in the same financial model. VetsCompared and managed websites can bring measurable demand into the practice, while Vetrics can carry that client through booking, care, payment and retention with attribution preserved from the original source. The owner can then see which spend creates profitable growth and increase investment where the economics work.

A more capable PMS can also make new revenue models practical. Better care pathways, structured follow-up, client participation, plans, targeted automations and new digital services can be introduced without creating a parallel administrative operation to support them. The practice can experiment with the customer experience and measure whether those changes increase uptake, retention or lifetime value.

Those improvements flow into the financial quality of the business. Higher revenue from existing clinical capacity, better client retention and lower administrative cost should improve operating margins. More predictable acquisition and less dependence on manual processes also make growth easier to repeat across additional clinicians or sites.

For an owner who eventually wants to sell, merge or bring in investment, that creates a more attractive asset. A buyer is looking at more than current turnover. They will care about margin, quality of earnings, growth, client retention, operational dependence on key individuals and how easily the model can scale. A practice with clear acquisition economics, strong recurring client relationships and systems that allow it to grow without proportionately increasing overhead should be able to tell a much stronger story.

Vetrics should therefore be assessed against the value it can help create in the business over several years, alongside the immediate savings in staff time. The same applies to VetsCompared and other acquisition channels. If the combination can increase profitable revenue, improve margins and make the business easier to scale, the return to the owners can be substantially larger than the cost of the technology itself.

Take VetsCompared seriously while comparison is still developing

Independent practices should know what prospective clients see when they find them on VetsCompared. The profile is part of the public face of the practice whether anyone inside the business is actively managing it or not.

The commercial case comes from the kind of traffic the platform attracts. People comparing practices, checking prices or asking for quotes are already much further along in the decision than somebody who has simply landed on a website. That gives independents a chance to compete while the choice is still open.

A good independent does not have to be the cheapest locally if it gives people enough confidence to choose it. Practices that want to grow should claim the profile, keep it accurate, respond to relevant quote demand and pay attention to the services and locations that generate interest.

The platform should then be judged on whether it produces appointments, worthwhile clients and revenue. If it does, give it more attention. If it does not, the practice should know that from the numbers rather than from impressions.

Put numbers against the opportunity

Practice owners should be looking at a small number of commercial measures much more closely: lifetime client value, average transaction value, basket value, clinician utilisation and the proportion of staff time that is genuinely billable or directly supports care.

Better customer journeys should move those numbers. A client who stays longer, accepts more appropriate care and keeps more of that activity with the practice is more valuable than one who simply books a first consultation. Clearer treatment pathways, stronger follow-up and better continuity can increase lifetime value and average spend without relying on crude price increases.

The same applies to capacity. Clinical time is the scarce asset in most practices, so every hour lost to admin, avoidable handoffs or poorly designed workflows has a real opportunity cost. If better systems return even a modest amount of vet and nurse time to billable work, the financial effect can be significant before any new client has been acquired.

VetsCompared should be judged on the value of the clients it helps bring in. Vetrics should be judged on what happens to those clients afterwards: whether the practice can increase lifetime value, improve basket size, retain more appropriate care and free more clinical time from administration.

Those measures give practice owners a much better basis for deciding where to invest, because they connect technology and acquisition directly to margin rather than treating them as overhead.

Start with the practice you have

A useful review can start with the practice as it operates today. Follow the route a new client takes from finding the practice through to follow-up, then look at the same journey from inside the business. The team will normally know where information gets entered twice, where processes rely on memory and which systems create unnecessary work.

Some practices will find that they can get much more from the technology already in place. Others will find that the current setup is limiting what they can do.

Those are the practices that should look seriously at Vetrics and engage properly with VetsCompared. One can unlock customer journeys that are difficult to deliver with fragmented or older systems; the other can put the practice in front of prospective clients while they are still choosing. Both should be judged commercially, through additional clients, better capacity utilisation, stronger lifetime value and lower administrative cost.

Independent practices already have many of the things owners say they value, including local ownership, continuity and clinicians who know the people and animals they are treating. Better systems and better acquisition should make those advantages easier to see, easier to experience and more profitable to deliver.

Practical review checklist for independent practices

• Review the whole client journey. Identify where prospective clients drop out, where staff have to intervene unnecessarily and where revenue is being lost.
• Decide where you want more demand. Use spare capacity, service mix and the types of clients you want to attract to guide acquisition.
• Take control of how the practice is discovered. Make independence, services, availability and value easy to understand across your own channels and VetsCompared.
• Make it easier for interested owners to become clients. Remove avoidable friction between discovery and a confirmed appointment.
• Get better at explaining value. Use pricing, estimates and treatment options to help clients understand what they are buying.
• Treat medicine pricing in the context of lifetime client value.
• Put a number on unnecessary administration. Measure the staff time absorbed by recurring manual work and use that cost when assessing technology.
• Review whether your PMS can unlock the customer journeys you want to create. If it cannot support the experiences that would improve conversion, retention and lifetime value without adding more admin, include Vetrics in the review.
• Make retention systematic. Build appropriate follow-up into normal workflows rather than relying on memory.
• Connect marketing with revenue. Judge VetsCompared, Google Ads and other acquisition channels by the clients and revenue they create.
• Use technology to grow without increasing administration at the same rate.
• Put financial targets around the work. Know what a good client is worth, what unused capacity costs and what modest improvements in conversion or retention would be worth to the practice.