The continuity matters. Our vet remembers our cats from one visit to the next. They're not just a note on a card (though of course they have those too). So it is like your own doctor, in that once you have a relationship that works for you, there is a high bar to change it.

It wasn't until I had some extended dental work and had to wait around a dental surgery for half a day that I realised just how useful a good memory is for health practitioners.

Of course they have notes. But it's so much easier and more reassuring to remember key facts about patients beyond the immediate medical issues.

It's also easy to forget they see a lot of patients - every day.

So being able to remember names, relationships, interests and prior sessions with hundreds of patients - all the social glue that makes non-trivial reassuring smalltalk possible - is a hugely useful skill.

When I studied psychiatry there was a huge emphasis on what's known as "rapport"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapport

This is an interesting comment though ...

> We believed that the veterinarian is the most trusted partner for a pet parent (vs. the walker, grooming, trainer) and that owning the vet relationship would create the most value. We have since learned that more value may lie in the networks that have higher frequency (i.e. walking, grooming, boarding, etc.)

I wonder whether it would have worked to develop trust at walking, grooming, etc, and then try to upsell to vet services?

I'm skeptical it would have. They say at one point in their article:

>The more successful marketplace businesses (i.e. Uber, Postmates, Instacart, Rover)

I chuckled at the inclusion of Rover.com in there. I don't know whether they're successful or not, but I have used their service and hate everything about it. I found the one pet sitter that I ever want to use for my dog, and I no longer have any real need for Rover. But because I found the sitter through them, I now have this useless third party inserted into all my transactions with the sitter, and they often screw it up. (My messages to the sitter either don't go through, don't go through quickly, or go through but are garbled.)

I'm under the impression that rover isn't doing too well because I'm starting to see the annoying little upsells and desperate growth hacking attempts every time I log in. There's the "tell other people about us and we'll give you a discount," pop overs when trying to perform a transaction. There's little 2 and 3 dollar add-ons suggested at every step. There's the constant attempts to get you to give them more information in every interaction. (You know the ones, "Your profile is only 72% complete - click to complete it!")

Frankly, the only service I want is a 1-time flat fee finding service for the actual providers. I don't know if they could make money at that, and I don't care. But I actively avoid rover whenever possible because it removes value from the proposition for me.