Doggy Daycare 2.0

Recently, our doggy daycare closed down. This was sad for my wife and I since our dog has a LOT of energy. On Tuesdays, both me and my wife are gone all day and our dog needs to go to daycare. We loved our old daycare. They had great prices, they were always had availability and they were friendly. They were pretty low tech but that was fine with us since we haven’t known anything else. After they closed we began the search for a new place to send our dog.

Finally, we found a new facility close to where we live, and we submitted an application. For the first time ever, we were told our dog, Krembo, needs to have an interview at which one of us must be present. Should he pass his interview, he can spend the day at the facility and should he fail, we have to take him home with us. Well the day came and I’m glad to say Krembo passed. After Krembo was accepted I took a look at their website to find their number so that I could schedule his next visit for daycare and I was pleasantly surprised at how a little technology can really change the experience.

They’ve enabled users to schedule their dog’s reservation through their website. This is wonderful for dog owners since they can do this in the moment quickly without calling and relying on an employee to answer. I cannot tell you how many times we’ve repeatedly called our old daycare just to reach an employee and schedule a visit.

At our old daycare I would always wonder how our dog is doing. With our new daycare I was pleasantly surprised to learn they had an app. This in itself is nice in case we need to make a reservation but beyond reserving a spot at daycare, we can access the daycare cameras and see one of six places Krembo might be playing.

This facility clearly knows their audience well. Dog owners are obsessed with their dogs. There is never too much information. I’m impressed with how well this facility has designed the daycare experience around owners. Their consideration made a large difference with some very simple pieces of technology.

This experience has shown me that sometimes it only takes a small change to make a big difference in a person’s experience as long as you consider your user.