Frustrated with clients in the veterinary practice?? Here's what you need to know
How annoyed do you get at clients that just don’t respect your clinic's rules and protocols?
Clients that turn up without an appointment, clients that are late, fail to turn up, or keep calling or emailing for free advice? How about clients that compare you to other vets/practices, or expect you to do stuff you don’t want to do, like prescribe unnecessary antibiotics or tell them it’s cool to breed bulldogs?
After the teaching at yesterday’s group coaching call we had an interesting discussion about just that: getting frustrated and annoyed when clients don’t live up to our expectations.
Here’s the thing: You can expect all you want from other independent adults, but everyone is free to do what they want, at the end of the day. That’s the great thing about turning 18, right?!?! FREEDOM to do what we want!
We can have specific boundaries in our clinics, for example not seeing people without an appointment, not prescribing antibiotics without a culture first, etc. But we can’t control whether people will happily ACCEPT these boundaries. They might complain about you/to you, and turn up regardless.
Here’s where you want to keep your head level and be able to look at the facts, and not make this mean a lot of things. For example, a client turns up without an appointment. You might start spinning in thoughts like “Clients just don’t respect our work”, “They think we have nothing to do all day”, “They expect us to treat them as royalty”, and so on.
But notice that these are all assumptions you’re making up about this person, and generalising to include all clients. When in reality we have no idea what’s going through that person’s brain, right? And forgetting most people actually DO ask for an appointment.
So instead of getting worked up, annoyed and ruminating over it for the rest of the day, you want to look at the facts, and let the client be who they are. Is it a clear boundary that you never fit anyone in without an appointment? Fine, then communicate that, offer an appointment another day, and let the client deal with THEIR frustration. Accepting they’ll probably communicate their frustration to you. And then deciding where your tolerance level is before you fire a client. But with no added drama.
OR, you see the pet anyway, but accepting this is your CHOICE, and not spending the rest of the day complaining to everybody about the AUDACITY of the client expecting this. You’re only hurting yourself doing this, and adding layers of frustration on something that is essentially business.
Notice the difference between making these assumptions about the clients motives and moral, and just think “Oh, they were mistaken”, “They had unrealistic expectations so of course they’ll be disappointed”, “They must have some issue I don’t know about”, “They are just really worried about their pet”.
I always assume positive intent. Meaning, that I don’t search for an ulterior motive, or a deeper meaning in people’s words or actions. If I can stay neutral, and not make it mean anything about me or the clinic, it is much, much easier to deal with people and not escalate situations. And, if there’s literally abuse or other kinds of overstepping boundaries, there’s always the option to just let the client go (and call the police if necessary). But this is a client problem, not a you or clinic problem.
In your corner,
