Creating a Client Survey for a Veterinary Practice

Though Google Reviews are great ways to boost your hospital’s online visibility, they review very little. Unless the commenter remarks on specifics about your hospital, you know nothing more than the client liked the overall experience a lot, a little, or not at all. To overcome most clients’ reluctance to say anything bad about the team that cared for their beloved pet and to ensure you get information you can act on, you need to ask the right questions. Here is how to craft a client survey that’s convenient for clients to complete and that provides you meaningful information about your business.

1. Start With Your Expectations

Before you can survey your business’s success, you need to define what it is you are trying to achieve. Ask yourself and your leadership team:

• What do we expect from the client experience in our hospital?

• What promises do we make to patients and their owners?

• How do we want our employees to feel and behave at work?

These questions draw out the commitments that make your practice unique and encourage thoughtfulness about the ‘excellent customer care’ and ‘highest standards of medicine’ to which all hospitals attest. They remind everyone that client surveys aren’t about vanity—they’re about holding the hospital accountable to its vows of empathy, medical excellence, and workplace culture.

2. Translate Values Into Observable Behaviors

Clients can’t rate your policies or your internal training, but they can see how those things show up during their visit. The next step is to ask: How could a client observe our commitments being achieved during their visit?

For example:

• If you value empathy, clients might notice a warm greeting or a team member listening attentively.

• If you value patient comfort, they might see staff adjusting to a nervous pet’s body language.

• If you value teamwork, they might observe how smoothly staff members communicate and support one another.

Each of these observations can become the seed of a survey question.

3. Build Questions Around the Client’s Journey

Arrange your questions in order of the client’s experience at your hospital: arrival, exam, treatment, checkout. Keep the language conversational, as though you were asking them face-to-face. For example:

• “When you arrived, did you have the sense that we were fully prepared to see you? Did someone express an interest in your day thus far, your journey to the practice, or something else that made you feel they weren’t checking just anybody in, but you.

• “Did you notice our team paying attention to your pet’s mood and adjusting how they handled them based on what they saw?”

This sequence helps clients recall specific moments and gives you clearer feedback.

4. Choose the Right Measurement Tools

Different types of questions yield different types of insight. Use a mix to get a full picture:

• Rating scales (1–5 or 0–10) measure satisfaction and make it easy to track changes over time. (Example: “On a scale of 1–5, how engaged with you did our team members appear to be with 1 being not engaged and 5 being very engaged.)

• Yes/No or multiple-choice questions work for quick checks on observable behaviors, but are usually not effective at soliciting meaningful information on your service. For example, asking if a client’s phone number and address were confirmed when they checked in is off topic. That business is part of a hospital’s protocol for serving clients, not a meaningful aspect of service from the client’s perspective.

• Open-ended questions let clients qualify their answers. They help you learn more about the services you believe are important and to obtain a better understanding of the service that clients believe to be important.

When setting up scales, make the anchors clear: explain what 1 and 5 (or 0 and 10) mean.