Earlier in the year we sent all our clients a survey asking a few questions about our client service and your experience using us. The aim was to get some feedback so we can review what we do and either continue doing a great job or make some improvements to areas we could be doing better.

440 of you responded and I am incredibly grateful for you taking the time to not only do the survey but also add your very useful feedback comments as well. The aim of this post is to share with you the results and how we intend to use them to help improve our service for next year and beyond.

Q1 Was 'How likely is it that you would recommend Ridings Equine Vets to a friend or colleague?'

I was really delighted that 83% of you answered extremely or very likely, giving us an overall Net Promotor Score of 77

Q3 Was about value for money of our service and over 90% of you felt we met or exceeded your expectations.

We asked how long clients had been registered with us when they completed the survey and most respondents had been with the practice over 3 years but it was lovely to see some newer clients giving us feedback too.

Some of the additional comments we received were:

We asked for some specific areas we can improve and some of the comments we received are below along with things we are going to try to do to improve going forwards.

• Visits - you told us that appointments later in the day would be beneficial, and that more yards on the free visit scheme would help with finances.
  • For 2025 we have added more yards to our free yard visit scheme - contact the office if you would like us to consider your yard for the scheme
  • We are looking at ways we can provide more convenient appointments for clients

• Vets - you asked us to make sure we are introducing ourselves along with knowing your horses history before we arrive, you wanted us to inform you that you can buy your drugs online and you asked for accurate estimates for clinical procedures. Some of us had not called you when we said we would. A few clients were frustrated they never had the same vet, and others felt that the conversations were very commercially biased.
  • The vet team have discussed and reminded ourselves of the importance of introducing ourselves and also ensuring we are familiar with a horse’s history even on very busy days - We will endeavour to provide more accurate estimates although this can often be difficult depending on the complexity of the case and unknown outcomes.
  • The vets have reminder systems in place to carry out follow ups
  • We do not agree that our conversations are commercially biased. As a practice we are not set targets based on financial performance. Our aim is to practice best veterinary medicine and also educate our clients on their horses health and options available to them. Not all clients will wish to take up these options but we feel it is better to empower clients with the choice so they can decide the best steps for their horse
  • With regards to getting different vets all the time – for our standard visits we endeavor to meet
    clients needs regarding a specific vet for their appointment. For Zone visits and Yard visits this is
    not possible due to how we organise our diary, however you can always request a specific vet on a non-zone appointment and we will do our best to organise it for a zone appointment with enough notice but this can never be guaranteed.

• Clinical services - you asked us to offer 2 stage vettings for insurance, and a pre-season MOT. Someone suggested we are making too many kissing spine, stifle, hock and ulcer diagnosis – is it a way of making money?
  • We have always offered a 2 stage pre purchase exam which is the same as the one required by insurance companies for some types of policies – we always advise checking whether you require a 2 or a 5 stage exam.
  • We are happy to tailor an individual pre season MOT based on your requirements, please contact the office to discuss.
  • We pride ourselves in offering good veterinary medicine not motivated by financial targets. The increase in diagnosis of certain conditions across equine veterinary medicine in general is more likely a reflection of our improved knowledge and better diagnostic equipment available to us now. Many of our clients that have had their horses treated for some of the mentioned conditions report a significant difference in the horse’s welfare afterwards – that is good enough for us to feel we are doing something right!

• Office - You asked for worming reminders for Health Plan clients, some of you had issues not getting call backs when promised.
  • From 2025 all Health Plan clients will receive quarterly text reminders to perform a worm egg count.
  • We try our best to always get back to clients but sometimes things do get missed, it is not that we don’t care but rather that some days can be manic. We have discussed this as a team and are thinking of ways we ensure we are more responsive to our clients.

• Client talks - you asked for more of them! And more social media videos too.
  • We aim to hold one client talk every 3 months (4 a year) in addition to those done on behalf ofother organisations. For example every year we often do a talk at the RDA, various Riding Clubs and Equestrian Centres – keep an eye on our FB page for details.
  • We will try our best to increase our videos on social media for 2025

• Pricing - You said you wanted us to reduce call out charges, try and keep costs down, some of you were put off by the pay on the day policy and would prefer to spread the cost of bills over at least 2 months.
  • As a small independent practice we try our best to keep our costs as low as possible. Unfortunately as with many other business’s we will never be able to compete with bigger practices or those owned by corporate companies - We offer a health plan to help spread the cost of routine treatment and make the routine care more affordable- see our website for more details or contact the team.
  • We changed our policy to payment at the time in 2018 due to a large amount of outstanding debt that was not paid. Unfortunately there are still some clients that feel that Ridings is a charity and have no intention of paying for our services. We usually have over £100,000 of outstanding debt at any one time which as a small business is incredibly difficult to manage. Our office team spend an awful lot of their time relentlessly chasing some clients for outstanding debts and often being given the run around. We appreciate that these clients are the minority but in order to give the best possible service to all of our clients we need to have a reasonable cash flow to ensure we can keep stocked with drugs, pay salaries and other overheads

• Miscellaneous - you asked us not to sell to a corporate, You suggested a client section on the website with advice on health and wellbeing topics and you asked us to offer an ambulance/ transport service.
  • We pride ourselves on being independent, and do not want to change. But please read the other comments above to see the pressure we are under from clients to reduce prices or offer more services – we can’t do this and remain independent, as much as we would love to eat all the cake!
  • We are in the process of having a new updated website produced and this will contain a dedicated section for all our health blogs – we will let clients know when this goes live!
  • We feel there are already a number of really excellent providers of horse transport in our area that can offer a much better service than we could – please contact the office team if you would like some contact numbers

Once again a very big THANK YOU to everyone who completed the survey and hopefully when we run it again next year you will notice the positive changes we have made based on your very helpful feedback.

Jenny & Team Ridings xxx