When business owners consider investing in pet care-specific software, many see it as just another expense on their balance sheet. However, the right software solution is more than just a tool for scheduling appointments—it’s a powerful revenue generator that can transform your business operations and boost your bottom line. By improving customer experience, streamlining day-to-day operations, and opening up new service opportunities like enrichment activities and departure grooming services, pet care software becomes an invaluable asset that provides a huge ROI for the average $200 a month that it costs.
Reducing Employee Mistakes with Pet Care Software
How much does an employee mistake cost the business in immediate revenue, reputation, and lifetime value? The pet care industry has a lot of moving parts and requires very systematic processes to deliver the highest quality of care. When business owners, regardless of the size of their business, rely on staff using pen and paper there are exponentially more mistakes that are made that have real costs to the business. Leveraging software will truly systematize your daily operations which creates better customer experiences, simplifies new staff training, reduces staff mistakes, and creates operational efficiencies that reduce your overall labor expenses.
Enhanced Customer Experience with Kennel Software: Keep Clients Coming Back
In the highly competitive pet care industry, customer experience is key. Pet owners want seamless interactions, timely communication, and personalized attention for their furry family members. Pet care-specific software allows businesses to elevate this experience in several ways:
Online Booking & Self-Service with Pet Care Software
Give customers the ability to book services 24/7 via an easy-to-use online pet portal. This saves time for both the customer and your staff, reducing manual work and enabling clients to manage their own reservations. The other benefit of a configurable online booking experience is the growth of your average revenue per pet through educating and prompting customers to personalize their pet’s experience with enrichment and departure grooming services.
VOIP/Phone System Integration with Kennel Software
When you implement an integrated phone system with your business, you can ensure all communication (phone and text) is attached to your business phone number which simplifies things for pet parents who want to share feedback, get updates about their pet, and modify their current reservations.
Real-Time Updates via Pet Care Software
With text and email integration in kennel software, pet parents will get a variety of automated messages that streamline communication.
- Appointment Reminder Texts: reduces no-shows and allows customers to confirm or cancel appointments in advance. This enables pet businesses to rebook other clients, especially during peak seasons and ensures the optimization of occupancy & revenue.
- Check-out Review Requests: This is commonly referred to as “reputation management” and when implemented properly, pet businesses can prompt customers to leave glowing reviews on the platform of choice (I prefer Google for the SEO benefit), but the BEST way is to also include a link to a digital survey to collect negative feedback. By giving both options, businesses can reduce the number of customers posting negative reviews and ensure quick responses to remedy any less-than-stellar experiences during their stay.
- After Hours Auto-Response: When your pet care software offers an automated text response after hours, it gives customers a timeline for when you will be able to respond and provides them a reminder that they can handle scheduling through your online booking platform. This is a great customer experience and will help reduce labor and optimize your average revenue per pet day/night when they book online.
- Digital Report Cards: The pets you are taking care of are considered family members. By providing a digital update on the pet’s stay or day of play in dog daycare, the customers have peace of mind that your staff is taking exceptional care of their furry family members. To elevate your report cards, I always recommend including a few pictures of their pup enjoying a game or enrichment service. Some companies choose to have digital report cards as a paid option which drives revenue, but these updates also reduce the number of pet parent phone calls where they just want to check in on their pups.
Text and/or email notifications keep pet owners informed about their pets’ well-being. This builds trust, strengthens relationships with clients, and provides an exceptional customer experience. One additional recommendation is to send digital report cards at the same time every day (for boarding dogs, I prefer a 3pm update and for daycare dogs, I like to see those sent out no later than noon).
Memberships & Packages:
Capturing loyal customers ensures consistent revenue and is commonly delivered through loyalty programs and pre-paid packages. A great kennel software platform will automate the use of package days for daycare, boarding, and grooming services. If you have a membership model where you offer unlimited daycare or have a facility membership where additional benefits are associated (early holiday booking, free room upgrades, discounts on retail items, discounts with local partner businesses, and free enrichment services), your software can automate the charging of a card on file.
Operational Efficiency with Pet Care Software: Save Time, Increase Profits
Efficiency is at the heart of any thriving business, and the pet care industry has such high labor costs that efficiency is critical to allow a business to hit the critical metric of labor being no more than 35% of revenue. By streamlining your operations with software designed specifically for the industry, you can cut down on administrative tasks and focus on what truly matters—caring for the pets and delivering high-quality services.
Automated Scheduling with Kennel Software:
Easily manage staff shifts, appointments, and capacity limits with software that optimizes resources. By automating these processes, you’ll reduce double bookings, minimize idle time, and ensure that every day runs smoothly.
Operational Reporting with Pet Care Software:
Operational reporting is critical to the successful delivery of services within the pet industry. Having quick access to reports that detail feedings, medications, enrichment services, grooming, and training services enables your staff to stay organized and work to deliver exceptional care from a checklist. Pet businesses that operate from organized reports can save more than an hour daily compared to facilities that use pen and paper to manage their business. In addition to efficiency, reporting is 100% accurate while you will see more employee mistakes if they are creating checklists manually.
Streamlined Check-In/Check-Out with Kennel Software:
Speed up the customer experience with quick, automated check-in and check-out processes. Evaluating the front desk dashboard is critical to ensuring that your team is optimizing every check-in with easy access to service details (enrichment, departure services, and packages), while also having a simple way to know who is checking out of dog daycare with a pre-existing package that can be applied as payment. This reduces wait times and keeps customers happy while allowing your staff to focus on cleaning and other revenue-generating tasks.
Centralized Billing & Payments with Pet Care Software:
Integrated payment processing simplifies invoicing, billing, refunds, reporting and transactions. This allows you to capture payments faster, improve cash flow, and reduce the time spent chasing down unpaid bills. Software solutions that offer Text to Pay will also improve the check-out process where staff can work to build stronger relationships by giving pet updates vs dealing with collecting payments.
Passing Along Credit Card Fees with Kennel Software:
With integrated payments, not only do you streamline operations, but you also have the ability to offset credit card fees by passing them along to customers. This can be a significant amount of profit that can be reinvested into the business. If you consider the average facility has a profit margin of around 25%, then to earn $35,000 in profit they would have to generate $140,000 of revenue. And to earn $8,750 in profit you would have to generate $35,000 in revenue. OR, you could pass the credit card fees along to customers and that profit boosts your EBITDA.
Growth of Additional Revenue Channels with Pet Care Software
The software isn’t just about improving what you already offer—it can help you expand your services, increasing revenue opportunities with little additional effort. A prime example is enrichment activities and departure grooming services.
Enrichment Activities Managed by Kennel Software:
Kennel software can promote and schedule enrichment services such as playtime, training, or puzzle activities for pets playing in daycare or staying for boarding. With real-time communication, online booking, and integrated texting you can easily promote these value-added services to pet owners, increasing your average revenue per pet.
Departure Grooming Managed by Pet Care Software:
Offering a grooming session just before the pet is picked up from daycare or boarding is a highly attractive option for pet owners. Your software can automate reminders for this service, allowing customers to opt-in with a click. Departure grooming not only increases customer satisfaction but also adds a reliable revenue stream to your operations.
Special Events or Themed Holiday Services with Kennel Software:
If you are not yet taking advantage of holiday-themed services, now is the best time to start. These options can vary from Thanksgiving meals to Santa photos to birthday parties and a variety of other special events that drive pet parents in to not miss out on all the fun. Promoting these services ahead of time using email marketing or text blasts will boost attendance as well as your overall revenue.
Data-Driven Decision Making: Know What Works
With the robust reporting and analytics features of pet care-specific software, you gain insight into your business operations. From customer preferences and popular services to staff performance and occupancy rates, data becomes a powerful tool for decision-making. Financial reporting is critical to managing the key success metrics for a pet business. You can only manage what you can measure and when using kennel software, you can see how the business is performing from a revenue perspective by service, labor across the business and to understand which clients are your most loyal top spenders.
Service Popularity & Personalized Pet Experience Opportunities:
Track which services are most popular and identify opportunities to personalize pets’ experiences with enrichment or enrichment bundles. It helps if you use marketing filters to target specific pets (ie: Boarding clients who have an appointment within 7 days without enrichment services or departure grooming services attached to the appointment). This type of personalized offering ensures you are not overwhelming all customers with offers that aren’t relevant and builds additional value for the pets and their parents.
Labor as a Percentage of Revenue:
When most pet businesses operate on a particular dog-to-staff ratio, having the appropriate tools to monitor needed labor hours by department ensures you can optimize schedules to maintain a 35% labor-to-revenue ratio. Software delivers better resource allocation overall reducing labor costs while ensuring the highest quality of pet care.
Customer Retention and Long-Term Growth with Pet Care Software
Investing in pet care-specific software is not just about generating short-term profits. It also fosters long-term customer loyalty and retention. Happy, satisfied customers who enjoy streamlined experiences and enriched services are more likely to return and recommend your business to others.
Customer History & Personalization with Kennel Software:
By keeping track of pet preferences, special requests, and service history, you can tailor experiences to each client’s needs, creating a personalized touch that sets you apart from competitors. Knowing that a customer purchased your top Enrichment bundle on their last appointment makes it easier for your team to recommend the “same as last time”.
Monitor At-Risk Customers with Kennel Software:
The average pet business has an annual customer turnover of around 20%. When using kennel software you can easily identify and be proactive with customers who haven’t been to daycare in the past 3 weeks, you can promote early booking during the holidays to ensure you are at full capacity and you utilize the digital surveys to address less than ideal customer experiences and make it right.
Pet Care Software: A Smart Investment in Your Future
Pet care-specific software is not merely an operational tool; it’s a strategic investment that can help your business grow. By enhancing customer experience, improving operational efficiency, and unlocking new revenue streams like enrichment activities and departure grooming, your software transforms from an expense into a true revenue generator. In today’s competitive market, offering a seamless, personalized, and efficient service will differentiate your business and ensure long-term success.
Don’t just think of software as a cost—view it as an investment that pays for itself through enhanced customer loyalty, streamlined operations, and an increase in profitable revenue.
