How do you feel about tipping in restaurants? As an example of kneejerk reactions, it's a classic picture – very few of us keep a running tally during the meal, assessing the quality of service received - and yet, at the end of the meal, we are expected to make a rapid decision which may easily add tens of Pounds to the final bill which itself may already be eye watering without any added obligation. If you think about it, the whole idea is a bit of a con because it's a custom which exists to subsidise the restauranteur's costs – in reality, there is no better way to get the food to the diners and very few chefs would take kindly to an endless string of diners wandering into his or her kitchen to collect their own food. Whatever the history, the fact remains that tipping in restaurants has become a convention which allows the diner to reward the waiting staff for simply doing their job properly.
No restauranteur would want their clients to feel anything other than welcome nor treated with anything other than courtesy but, somewhat surprisingly, we are expected to pay extra if they actually deliver that service.

We cannot do that in our line of business and, moreover, our clients would ( and do) walk away if they feel that they haven't been treated appropriately. I cannot remember seeing a box near the door of any practice asking for 10% or more as a reward for our staff doing their jobs properly but I can recall when, at a VPMA Congress several years ago, I presented the Onswitch findings that >20% of clients, who did use a vet, were routinely using more than one vet. At the time, the RCVS commented that they found that surprising but, at countless meetings, I have asked veterinary surgeons and their staff about the incidence of such action and, with weary monotony, almost every hand goes up to describe how often this happens in their own practices.

Interestingly, the RCVS has recently conducted a survey of pet owners and horse owners, looking at the expectations of the public and I would take this opportunity to applaud this initiative. Like most people, I find myself leafing through the results, looking for the areas which most interest me and I was fascinated to see that, in this survey, some 88% of those surveyed routinely used just one practice – a number which I feel is surprisingly low – but we all know that we should treat numbers with some circumspection and look at the trends instead. Clearly, if somewhere between one in ten and one in five of our clients is happy to wander off to use another practice, that is behaviour which we need to better understand.

Indeed, understanding consumer behaviour is something which we should ignore at our peril but, in reality, this profession is rather good at that. Many may recall the excellent Quo Vadis? study which was performed in 1999, looking at more than 500 vets and thousands of their clients and the study very clearly showed that when looking at the two groups – vets and their clients – their expectations for the future were dramatically different. Even back in the last century ( just!) it was clear that veterinary clients wanted to be seen as individuals and for their individual preferences to be noted and acted upon but still, to this day, we insist on describing clients collectively and on avoiding the sort of measures which other retailers routinely adopt to liaise with and bond to their individual clients. Should we be surprised that the Pets at Home VIP club reached more than 2 million members over a year ago or that their VIP magazine has now the 14th highest circulation of any magazine title in the UK? I don't think so. Here is an organisation that caters for huge numbers of people with a massive footfall across the UK but where individual consumers feel that they are recognised and valued. How many of us operate a loyalty scheme, routinely offer our consumers the option of phone, text or email communication or even have any regular, personalised vehicle with which to contact our consumers? Is it really a surprise then if our consumers wander off to become someone else's consumers over time?

The RCVS research into customer expectations is laudable and provides interesting information. We should, however, resist the temptation to take the results too seriously, page by page. I find it hard to see that 31% of those surveyed used their main practice for complementary and supportive therapies although, should that be an accurate figure, we should perhaps look at some complementary therapies in a completely new light !
Similarly, do a third of our regular consumers really use our practices for the Pet Passport scheme so that they can take their pets abroad?

What is really disappointing is that, while the survey compares pet owners and horse owners and makes interesting but, probably quite obvious comparisons, there doesn't appear to be any meaningful comparison between cat and dog owners and every one of us knows that the dynamics of pet ownership and the use of the vet by these two groups differs significantly. Journey times for travel to and from the practice, for instance, have completely different significance for cat and dog owners but none of this appears in the data which I have seen. Of course, I haven't seen the raw data and it may be that the RCVS can furnish these comparisons which would be really valuable.

Now, you might say that, with my background at ISFM, I would say that but I would contend that there's no possibility of learning to sell the sizzle and not the sausage if we cannot, from the outset, decide what kind of sausage we're selling.

Ross@rosstiffin.com