We review our support tickets regularly to help us stay focused on the issues our customers are facing. Over the last 12 weeks we have seen a massive increase in microchip mix up issues.
To give a bit of background any time a customer be that a veterinary clinic, animal rescue, dog warden, pet owner etc opens a support ticket through email, phone call, live chat or a support form it flows through our state of the art support platform. Every support ticket gets a “category” logged against it. This helps us with several things:
- What issues our customers are having and what we can do to help them in a better way
- What technology should we build next to best support our customers
- Monitoring trends.
As you may know the pandemic caused a boom new homes getting pets. This is of course a great thing for many homes to welcome a new family member. It did bring problems and one of those problems was unscrupulous breeders as we detailed HERE in this article.
Of course this isn’t every pet breeder, many are fantastic do their job to a high standard. We work with many of them.
There are also a new set of animal breeders, people that hadn’t bred their pet before and started this process as covid took hold of the world.
We’ve seen a huge 300% increase in our support ticket category called “Microchip Mix up”.
This is where a pet owner has been given one microchip but in fact their pet has a different microchip and this is discovered in a pet’s first visit to a vet with their new owner.
I reviewed every single one of the tickets over the last week and didn’t find what I’d consider a common theme. What I did find was:
- A pet breeder used our platform to rehome animals but rehomed the animals with incorrect microchip numbers. At some point in the process they got mixed up with which pup had which microchip.
- Pet owners self registering -With every microchip we sell we provide a card like the below. These are commonly used by Veterinary clinics for registering our microchips to allow a breeder or pet owner to register their own microchip. The pet owner was given the wrong card by a breeder (who had got the pet microchipped) in every case.
The cards we provide with every microchip. They are used regularly by veterinary clinics to allow pet owners and breeders to register microchips. This is one of the ways we help vet clinics to register microchips they purchase.
Why isn't this good?
This isn’t good for one main reason. If any of these pets with mixed up microchips go missing and get scanned by an animal warden, animal rescue or vet we will not have the correct details to get that pet home.
What we recommend
We recommend the following:
- For pet breeders to always use a proper system to ensure they know which pet is which. We recommend using whelping collars which are different colour collars with the collar colour then added to the pet’s documentation. You can see whelping collars HERE on Amazon. We have seen numerous cases where puppies has never had a colour added to MyPet to distinguish pet from pet.
- We recommend for pet owners on their first visit to a vet to ask for a scan of their pet’s microchip and check this matches with their paperwork.
- For vet clinics we recommend a scan of a pet’s microchip if it’s a new pet your client has just welcomed into the family.
Reviews
2 Responses
Hello I’ve had my pup checked out when i first had her 8-9 weeks old
Excellent to hear! Super important it’s checked at some point just to be safe! 🙂
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