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Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used Clinic HQ to manage and support a high volume spay neuter clinic. We selected the software mainly for the appointment scheduling online which is a huge timesaver for a high volume clinic. Vouchers make up about 70% of our income so the voucher invoicing functionally was important to us as well. Finally, the integrations with other software was also very appealing to us.
Pros
- Appointment Scheduling
- Voucher Invoicing
- Reports
Cons
- In our experience, some basic functionality requires multiple steps to complete. Would like to see more efficiencies in the core functionality.
- ClincHQ provides minimal support to clients. During our service period with ClinicHQ, there were only two employees available to all clients for support. There was no implementation management and support tickets lacked meaningful information and was usually not resolved to our satisfaction. We got most of our support/help with issues from other users in a Facebook group. Clinic HQ stated recently that they have nearly 500 clients. Hiring more employees to provide quality support to clients would be a plus.
- Customer Service - Clinic HQ is privately owned. The owner is involved with support and is unprofessional, rude, and openly insulting to clients. In my experience, questions and feedback are taken as personal attacks and the owner attacks back. This has no place in business and is something we could not waste our time on since we have such a busy clinic. The messaging from the owner seems to be take it or leave it. I’ve never worked with a software company that operates this way. Listening to client feedback without taking offense and working with clients as partners would be a much better approach.
- ClinicHQ has a dated user interface and could be upgraded to include more efficiencies in the core functionality. However, it is privately owned and it appears unlikely that they can do a major product overhaul/upgrade due to lack of funds.
Return on Investment
- The monthly fee is $199 but, in our experience, the costs for the labor/time to resolve issues ourselves or work with support added about $200-$400 more in admin costs per month.
- When there was a credit card processor outage, functionality in ClinicHQ was impacted so our clients could not schedule appointments because a deposit was required resulting in lost clients and lost revenue, appointment reminder emails and notifications could not be sent so we had a 10-20% no show rate on those days resulting in lost income, and clients could not pay online prior to check-out and instead had to wait in long lines for a staff member to manually key in their credit card data resulting in a very poor and frustrating client experience.
- In our experience, the poor technical support and customer service was stressful and time consuming for our staff. Clinic HQ seems to value their time and costs over their clients’ time and costs. Because software is key to our high volume business and daily operations, we could not continue working with this software provider. Having only 3 U.S. employees to support U.S. clients, having outages of key functionality, and having no funding for major upgrades and new functionality were big drawbacks for us.