All vets want their clients to be happy, their patients healthy, and their business thriving. But at times, it can seem like meeting these goals is always just out of reach - you can succeed at two, but the third evades. One way to approach this problem is not by considering each goal in isolation, but to combine all three into a single entity.

Answer this: what is the product of your veterinary practice? From a pure business perspective, your product is not just medical outcomes, but is your client experience - an all-encompassing term that captures everything from the moment a pet owner contacts you, until the bill is paid and a pet is sent home happy and healthy.

Try googling “veterinary websites” and see what you get.

You'll find just about 1000 different web design businesses that offer their services to build you a website, and almost nothing explaining why you need a website in the first place - let alone how to pick out a good one from a bad one.

The market is saturated with veterinary web designers because the need for an online presence has quickly evolved from merely a perk to an absolute requirement from 2005 to today. Every client expects to find, at the absolute minimum, contact information and hours of business online, and the failure to provide this is enough to incite rage in any Millennial, and frustration in all others.

When Banfield’s State of Pet Health 2015 was released, it shed light on some worrying statistics. Beyond reflecting the general decline in the use of veterinary services (dogs averaged 1.5 visits in 2006, down from a mean of 1.9 visits in 2001), it suggested that veterinarians and pet owners are increasingly operating on two totally different wavelengths, with our conversation topics and vocabulary diverging sharply from the common concerns of pet owners.

While the majority of veterinarians want to speak about vaccines, spay/neuter, & parasite control, pet owners are most concerned with their pet's diet, exercise, play, and emotional well-being. These differences are creating less schedule routine visits, more emergency situations, and more pet owners seeking Dr. Google.

There’s two ways we can apply this information. Either veterinary professionals must change their rhetoric to match the expectations of their clients, or we need to do a better job educating the public about why we advocate for preventative medicine like antiparasitics, dental cleanings, and vaccine protocols.

On the surface, Millennials’ expectations seem paradoxical - they seek out personalized, empathetic experiences, but also eschew human interactions in favor of self-service through websites and apps.  To make sense of this, veterinarians need to know two things:

1. Millennials only welcome the involvement of people where humans can be more efficient, or offer something more meaningful than an algorithm or device.
2. Millennials are highly independent and resourceful, and value businesses that equip them to address their own problems, rather than forcing dependence on customer service representatives.