Improving client engagement for veterinary clinics

The challenge

The landscape for software in veterinary was very fractured, with existing vendors charging a lot of money for very limited functionality like appointment booking or appointment reminders. Veterinary clinics, as well as the people that work at them, stood to benefit from consolidating everything into one tool.

However, clinics manage all their internal data via a PMS (Patient/Practice Information Management System) — which we need to help them keep up-to-date, as well as to pull recent data from. Everything from client and patient (pet) data, to reconciling payments for appointments, procedures and medication.

The approach

I established new processes for developing the product, by interviewing customers to get a better understanding of the problems they were facing. As well as anything they’ve found helpful or frustrating in any other software service they’ve used.

I also joined sales and customer success calls, to get closer to the people using PetsApp — as well as handling 5%+ of all customer support requests. Weaving insights from all the above into our product planning and design.

This was also adopted by engineers in the product team too, so I wasn’t a “bottleneck” to gaining insights directly from customers. This helped me and the rest of the engineers have an outsized impact for a team with one designer and three–four engineers.

The team

CEO, CTO, 4 engineers, customer success and sales.

My impact

Research and planning

• Interviewing 10+ practice managers, accountants, nurses, receptionists and vets — focusing on understanding clinic payment reconciliation and in-clinic workflows
• Speaking to existing and prospective customers at a trade show (London Vet Show)
• Handling 5%+ of all customer support requests via Hubspot
• Adding tracking to events in our products, and then managing and updating our event tracking dashboards in Amplitude
• Writing up feature and improvement proposals in Notion — pulling in insights from research, data from analytics and desk research of competitors and similar solutions in other products — then proposing a solution, that will have the highest impact from a minimal amount of work

Design

Leading design on:

• several iterations of a campaigns feature, allowing clinics to “broadcast” messages or information to pet owners, which could be promotional or informative — this feature was used to let cat owners know about a pet food recall and potentially helped save hundreds (even thousands) of cats!
• several iterations of the chat functionality across web apps, native apps and web widgets
• a new iteration of the video call functionality on the web apps
• a payment reconciliation feature to help clinics with cashing up from PetsApp
• a component library (design and frontend), built using Figma, React and StoryBook
• a redesign the vet-facing marketing site (petsapp.com) and improving demo form visits from <5% to over 10% — and demo bookings from <1% to 3%
• the “Find your vet” service, leveraging clinic reviews and appointment requests to improve awareness in the veterinary market in the US, UK, Ireland and Canada
• a web widget for clinics to place on their website, for pet owners to start chats, request appointments and join the clinic’s PetsApp — clinics with the web widget embedded on their site were less likely to churn by up to 50%
• a new pet owner focused web app, a.k.a. PetsApp web — an MVP with chat and account management
• a wellness plan (or health plan) management system for clinics to set up subscriptions for pets — across web and native apps
• appointment booking and requesting service and experience across app and web apps, for both clinics and pet owners
• communicating new features to clinic teams using Beamer, an in-product marketing tool

Leading design across the following products:

• Pet owner and clinic team native mobile apps (Android and iOS)
• Clinic team native web app and native mobile apps (Android and iOS)
• Clinic website widget
• Marketing site — for B2B and D2C segments

The work

Clinic dashboard

dashboard.petsapp.com (requires account)

Chat inbox

The chat inbox is where clinic team members will spend most of their time, being able to manage all inbound communication, as well as tracking any chats that are being dealt with in-clinic. I iterated on this design several times after speaking to and hearing from customers — and this design is likely to keep evolving to meet the needs of different teams.

Video calling

Telemedicine was an essential part of the platform during the peak of lockdowns in the UK and Ireland. I iterated on the initial design implemented before I joined, to give clinic teams a smoother and nicer experience before, during and after video calls.

Subscriptions

An important part of evolution for the business model of PetsApp was to expand into helping clinics manage wellness / pet health plans. Allowing the business to charge a small fee, leveraging existing scale of payment processing to keep that charge super low. This feature spans all platforms for pet owners and clinic teams — with there being even more room for iteration to deliver even more value to all users.

Payment reconciliation

After hearing from a lot of customers that reconciling payments from PetsApp in their PMS was a painful experience, I interviewed 5+ customers to understand what outcomes they would want from a payment reconciliation feature. I found out that “cashing up” at the end of the day was too difficult in the platform, whilst accounting teams also had difficulty with weekly and monthly reconciliation. The initial and simplest solution was to just move all payments to their own tab and provide better exporting functionality.

Campaigns

I led the design on the initial version of campaigns, which allowed clinic teams to broadcast messages via the chat system. However, I found that clinic teams wanted to be able to share information without starting a chat — so iterated on this feature to allow clinic teams to push content pages to an “Inbox” in the app, as well as push notifications, emails and SMS.

Lite

To open the platform up to clinics who just wanted to manage their listing on petsapp.com — I designed a new “Lite” version of each section of the dashboard. These served to provide the value proposition of each section to these clinics, and provide a route to get a full demo.

Pet owner and clinic app

App Store · Play Store

Clinic app

Pet owner app

Web widget

widget.petsapp.com

Marketing site

petsapp.com

I worked on several iterations of the marketing site — using feedback from clients and people with “in-clinic” experience from within the company. With each iteration reflecting an updated version of the branding — including illustrations, colours and typefaces.

Find a vet

petsapp.com/find-a-vet

I designed the entire new experience and worked with an agency who built the initial MVP. Once launched, we took over the codebase and hosting — and I added tracking to the site. Once set up I created graphs and dashboards in Amplitude to track conversion funnels and page performance. 6 months after launching, 56% of all visitors made a search, and 5.11% of all visitors requested an appointment or left a review. With an average of 50+ appointment requests and 5+ reviews per month without any marketing spend.

Product video

Produced using AfterEffects to send out to prospects and to feature on the marketing site.