Researching customer and team experience across a multi-location dog training company.

What Instinct wanted to learn about its clients' experience

Instinct Dog Behavior and Training is a dog training company with locations across the United States. It offers puppy and obedience training, behaviour consulting for problems such as reactivity and anxiety, board-and-train programs, boarding and daycare, and virtual sessions.

Leadership asked where marketing and digital tools could make clients happier, and wanted any decision about marketing spend to be an informed one. That meant starting with what clients and the team were experiencing.

Planning the research with Instinct's leadership

I ran the research, and Instinct's team brought what they know about dogs, training, and their clients. I worked with the co-CEOs from the start, through a planning session and a defining success workshop. From those, I put together the research plan and presented it to them for approval. Then we set who to talk to and why, and how to add secondary research and the data Instinct already collected.

Leadership measured success 3 ways: how satisfied clients were, how engaged the team was, and financial performance. The workshop also named 3 challenges:

• A slow sales process, where potential clients were being lost before they started
• Information from the behaviour assessment every client completes, which wasn't being put to use
• Keeping technology from crowding out the personal service clients valued

Leadership and I agreed the project would deliver the research, the recommendations, and a plan the team could take forward on its own.

We worked within 4 constraints. The scope assumed a few data sources, and Instinct had thousands of client check-ins and hundreds of reviews. Once that was clear early in the research, we agreed to extend the timeline to get the most from the extra data. That data was spread across disconnected systems for booking, records, and training notes, which turned out to be one of the findings. Discovery was planned for 4 to 8 weeks, depending on when team members across the locations could take part and how quickly data could be gathered. And client evidence came from what clients had already told Instinct, in check-ins and reviews, rather than new interviews.

Research with Instinct's team, and what its clients had already said

I started with the team, because they hear from clients at every stage, including the parts clients never put in a review. The main evidence came from 4 places:

• The team: one-on-one conversations with 5 team members in leadership and behaviour consultant roles at 4 locations, and a survey answered by 18 people across 6 locations
• Training program check-ins: more than 4,500 that clients had filled in during their programs
• Google reviews: more than 240, across 7 locations, one more than the survey reached
• Website analytics: a year of data, across 8 reports on how people found, used, and returned to the site

Instinct's own map of its client journey, a crawl of the website, and research on where its audience spends time online added supporting detail.

I used AI tools to help organize the check-ins and reviews, then analyzed them myself and confirmed findings with Instinct where needed. The reviews are public. The internal check-ins had names and other personal details removed first. The aim was to understand what the feedback said about each location and about Instinct as a whole, and to check it against what the team had told us.

Much of the project went into building a clear picture of the current state. Instinct was already collecting check-ins and reviews, but didn't have a single view that read them together, next to what the team was saying. From that came a current-state client journey, from first inquiry to follow-up, and profiles of Instinct's clients and team members.

What clients valued, and where the experience broke down

Reviews and check-ins described real progress with reactivity and anxiety, and trainers who explained each step. A behaviour consultant and co-owner described it from the team's side: "Clients are really appreciative when we take the time to explain each step of the process, especially for dogs with complex needs like aggression or anxiety."

The same sources showed where the experience broke down. Follow-up was inconsistent. Clients working through long-term behaviour problems sometimes felt out of the loop, and when progress was slower than they expected, some stopped. Many found it hard to apply what they learned outside a session. As an operations manager put it, "Clients need reassurance, especially when it comes to their dog's progress. Some of them get really anxious when they don't hear from us regularly."

3 systems that didn't connect, for clients and for the team

Booking happened in one system, boarding and records in a second, and training notes and videos in a third. None of them shared information, so clients were asked for the same details more than once, and moved between logins to manage one dog's training. A co-owner described what clients told her: "We're asking clients to log into multiple systems: booking in one place, training notes in another. It's too much, and clients are vocal about how frustrating that is."

The behaviour assessment every new client completed had a similar problem. It is long, it asks for a history that can be hard to write down, and it had to be finished in one sitting. Leave the page or take too long, and the progress could be lost.

The team felt the same systems from the other side. New team members waited on system setup, which left gaps in service. The call centre that handled first inquiries didn't always have local knowledge about each location, so a consultation could wait days. (I wrote about what happens when a tool suits one team and not the next.)

The team asked for training on hard conversations

The one-on-one conversations showed the team's strength. Team members described listening first, staying with clients through difficult cases, and turning complaints around, in 2 cases by offering extra sessions. A co-owner and behaviour consultant described her approach: "The most important thing is to listen, to make sure they feel heard before jumping into solutions."

They also asked for support. Team members wanted more training on setting expectations, on handling clients upset about slow progress, and on sales. As one put it, "We could definitely use more training on how to handle difficult clients, especially when they're upset about slow progress."

Most website visitors arrived on a phone

Over the year of website analytics, close to 3 in 4 visitors came on a phone. Return visits dropped sharply after a first visit, and the time people spent on the site was short. The team described clients struggling to book and to find information. The site crawl added smaller fixes, such as location pages with near-identical content and pages missing search descriptions.

The evidence pointed to the service before the marketing

The question was about marketing. The evidence pointed first to the systems, the follow-up, and the training behind the service. Spending more on marketing would have brought more people into the same experience.

All 3 of leadership's challenges came back in the findings. The slow sales process showed up in the client journey, with several manual calls and emails before a consultation and leads marked lost after unanswered follow-ups. The assessment information was hard to use while clients struggled to finish the form. And the disconnected systems were where technology was crowding out the personal service.

The report covered customer, team, and website experience together, and set out next steps in order:

1. Simplify the systems. Review what each tool does and where they overlap, then test one combined setup with a single team before changing it for everyone. 2 routes were on the table: a client portal that brings booking, progress, and messages into one place, or connecting the existing tools so they share information.
2. Fix the behaviour assessment. Let clients save their progress and come back, and explain up front why it matters.
3. Follow up by stage. A short pre-qualification step to speed up the first conversation, follow-ups matched to what a client has done, one more check-in before marking a lead lost, and clear expectations for long-term behaviour cases.
4. Train and onboard the team. Training on expectations and difficult conversations, and faster setup for new team members.
5. Make booking easier on a phone. Simplify the booking path and test it with real users.
6. Use one voice. Templates for common situations, and consistent language across emails, calls, and the website.

Marketing still had a place, and it came after those: client stories, reviews, partnerships with the pet sites Instinct's audience already visits, and content for the client groups in the profiles.

What Instinct left with: opportunities, ways to fix them, and an order to work in

I walked the co-CEOs through the evidence, the process, what the data showed, how it related to what we heard about the service, and the plan to roll the changes out in stages. Leadership's question was answered: marketing had a place, and it came after the systems, follow-up, and training that clients and the team had described.

The team came away with:

• A clear picture of the current state, built from its own clients' and team's words: the client journey from first inquiry to follow-up, and profiles of its clients and team members
• Opportunities across customer, team, and website experience, each tied to the evidence behind it
• Ways to approach each fix, with options where there was more than one route, and a smaller test before any change reached every location
• A 30, 60, and 90-day plan with checkpoints, starting with the systems, the behaviour assessment, and follow-up
• Training needs named in the team's own words, from setting expectations to handling hard conversations
• Measures to track as changes went in, from booking and return visits to how clients responded to follow-ups

The check-ins and reviews Instinct was already collecting can show whether those changes are working.