4 Essential Vet Clinic Layout Considerations To Improve Your Client’s Experience

Targeting clients’ satisfaction and creating a wide client base requires aligning with the service level they expect to get in your clinic. Your veterinary clinic layout must consider their perceptions about the convenience and comfort you provide your clients with, as well as their needs and first impressions.
It’s not only restricted to the clinical result of their visits, your expertise and accuracy as a veterinarian can do nothing without a comfortable and stress-free environment for both clients and their pet animals enhancing the potentiality for further visits and consults.

Planning for a veterinary clinic layout

Logically, the pet animal will never come without its owner, and each owner expects a specific level of service, comfort, privacy and safety they will find in your pet clinic.
Considering clients’ impressions of the comfort they find in the exterior in addition to the first impression of their visit, you should consider the exterior aspect of your veterinary clinic layout.

Learn how your client care impacts your veterinary practices.

Considerations for Veterinary Clinic Layout

Clients’ experience in your clinic depend on external and internal details that immediately affect their impressions starting from arrival to the building, entrance, going through the reception and ending with sitting in the waiting area.
Here are recommendations for each station:

Arrival

It’s a point of increasing thoughts and perceptions, and here are some considerations and tips that reflect the quality of the service and comfort you provide your clients with:

Location

-You shall consider how easy your client can find the clinic and how obvious the entrance is.

Car Parking

-A location with an available area for cars to park would be a good choice.
-Using parking signs and lines to help find spaces as possible and signs as guidance to no parking or secured areas.
-Places for wheelchairs to be loaded from cars will be useful.

Light

-Showing the entrance at night times, guiding at the entrance passage and car parking reflects how you care for your clients.

Wheelchair Ramp

-Ensuring easy access for owners with mobility challenges and a hint of respecting and welcoming all pet owners.

Green Area

-Green walking spaces for owners and their pet animals to walk and relieve stress before admission.
-Designing the garden with litter boxes and bins can be useful to minimize the probability of urinating or defecating in the waiting area.

Entrance

Presuming a variety of scenario cases which require initiative and immediate assistance can help you with a better veterinary clinic layout.
Your client may be a mother carrying her baby, maybe an elder with a wheelchair, or may come with two different animals or even two or more different species.
Your clients aren’t on the same level of controlling their animals and a conflict between two dogs or escaping shall be also assumed.

Criteria of Ideal Entrance:

• Transparent glass will be the best choice to reflect what’s going on the opposite side.
• A large door with two parallel approaches is preferred; the left one as an ingress and the right one as an egress to minimize the probability of congestion and overstocking at the entrance.
• A sufficient space between the door and the reception counter shall be also considered to avoid interrupting the ingress passage.
• A manually opened door is preferred.

Reception

Reception’s layout affects the performance of reception employees, and clients’ first impression depends on how smoothly and quickly their enquiries and needs are received and answered.
Greeting clients, eye contact and interacting with owners in the waiting area shall be also considered in the veterinary clinic layout.
Keeping the safety of your employees in mind, receptionists are more exposed to the risk of aggressive clients or robbery attempts.
Here are tips to ensure a convenient reception area for both receptionist and clients:

Position

A desk with a suitable seat that gives easy access to a computer, keyboard, printer and credit card machine ensures smooth and quick performance.

Location

Preferred an obvious and easily reached for clients in both the inside and outside areas.
Access to waiting areas
which enables direct interaction with owners and maintains items displayed for sale.

Counter’s Height

Your clients are not always the same, a child or a client with a wheelchair finds difficulty interacting with the receptionist, so, it shall accommodate different points to serve clients and show respect in various conditions.

Access To The Clinical Area

Access to the clinical team reinforces communications which in one way or another affects the whole performance. But unlimited access to dispensary areas isn’t preferred.

Security

A desk linking back to an area of colleagues enhances receptionists’ safety.

Waiting Area

Well well-planned veterinary clinic layout gives priority to clients’ experience during the short period before the appointment.

A comfortable, quiet and stress-free waiting area improves your image.
Here are some recommendations to maximize the convenience of waiting:
-Different separated seats to enhance the feeling of comfort and privacy
-One-species areas can be applied to reduce the incidence of conflicts
-Allocating a separate area for noisy dogs, especially for owners seems to be unsocial

Learn more about Making your veterinary practice a client-friendly space.

Conclusion
Targeting your clients helps you know more about their needs, thoughts and perceptions that you in no way can neglect in your veterinary clinic layout.
Your client’s satisfaction isn’t restricted only to your expertise or accuracy as a veterinarian, they also follow their perception to get a certain level of convenience and comfort to get in your clinic starting from arrival and how obviously the clinic is located passing through the reception and how they are handled and the how comfort they find the waiting area.
Each station has considerations to be kept in mind to reinforce your client’s experience.