You love what you do and you can’t imagine doing anything else, but sometimes the non-stop ringing of the phone in your animal clinic or vet practice is enough to drive you mad.
Your patients and their owners seem happy enough with your services, but they often complain about long hold times and many familiar faces have simply stopped coming in, even for a regular weigh-in and a treat. There has to be a solution to the bottleneck on the telephone that can help patients both old and new.
As it turns out, a medical answering service isn’t just for people anymore. In fact, many well-trained medical answering service teams are ready to help calm the chaos in busy animal clinics by taking over all or some of the telephone traffic and appointment setting duties.
Here are three reasons to give a vet answering service a try:
Eliminating hold times retains business. According to a recent eMarketer Customer Experience Roundup report, customers list waiting on hold as the second most frustrating aspect of the customer support experience. In fact, 52 percent of those callers surveyed said they had stopped doing business with companies that offered poor customer service. Choosing to turn over some of your calls to an answering service means your callers get the help they need faster and it makes them feel like their problem is important to you and your team. There’s nothing that improves customer satisfaction more than a patient feeling like they’ve been heard.
Painless appointment setting is possible. Along with letting your answering service take messages for you, you can also give them access to a shared calendar so they can help book appointments. This way, your answering service can act like a designated appointment scheduler, updating, deleting and adding new appointments as needed so your in-house staff can spend more time with your patients.
If your office has more than one veterinarian or also offers grooming or boarding, your appointment scheduler can handle that, too. Just provide them with the information they’ll need to make the appointment, and they’ll take it from there.
No more sleepless nights. Have you ever sat up at night wondering just what you’d do with all the animals in boarding if the power were to go out or the phones were knocked offline due to a natural disaster? Even if the building and the animals were perfectly fine, their owners would be beside themselves until they knew their beloved pets were alright.
You can give your answering service a basic disaster plan to follow in case your business can’t be reached, which might include their taking over your phone lines until further notice. Once you call in to let the answering service know that the animals are safe and sound, their owners can breathe a collective sigh of relief and start making arrangements to collect their dogs and cats.
The last thing that busy animal clinic employees should be worried about is the telephone when anything can and does go wrong at the worst times. By turning your animal clinic calls over to an answering service, your sharp-eyed vet techs and receptionists will be free to do the jobs they were trained for.
