Terms of engagement: customer-friendly tech

The way people want to interact with veterinary clinics is continually evolving. Gone are the days where the only important piece of marketing was where your phone number appeared in the Yellow Pages. Instead, offering additional ways for customers to find and communicate with you has become paramount, and lots of new tools and services now exist to cater for that need.

Asynchronous communications, defined as conversations that can be had in turns and do not require immediate responses, along with self-serve platforms, also thankfully have huge benefits for those clinics that can adopt them and build them into their clinic processes. It is much more efficient being able to deal with non-urgent queries in between tasks that are by definition synchronous, such as consultations.

Phone calls are one of those choke points in clinics – they have a habit of always ringing when receptionists are also most busy dealing with people directly in front of them, with both interactions requiring total engagement. Firing off a quick message back to an owner in between serving customers in the waiting room is much more efficient and rewarding for both parties.

Adding technology into your practice is only beneficial where it can integrate well with your existing systems and processes. Having data siloed in different platforms, or requiring your team to engage with five different tools, can be a net negative. PMS integration is the cornerstone of doing this effectively. Ensuring you are using a PMS with an open application programming interface, or API, and a philosophy of engaging with third parties can make or break adding in these technological tools. In some cases, not having a sufficiently open PMS may prevent the tool from being useful at all.

Online appointments

Online appointment booking was one of the first areas clinics started to use to engage with their clients digitally. An average phone call to book an appointment can take more than five minutes, and that is before a new client registration process. The rigmarole of trying to suggest dates/times also exists, with clients having to check their diary at the same time. Clients being able to self-serve these functions in certain situations can be a huge time saving for both parties.

Some caveats exist here, though. Most vets are more protective over their diaries than they are of their Schedule 1 pharmaceuticals. An online booking system needs to function more like a trained receptionist than just allowing a free-for-all into the diary.

Similarly, simply dumping unstructured data into the PMS can cause another job for the team as appointments are booked, negating one of the big benefits of the tool. Systems that only allow booking requests also fall into this category, as it does not truly replace a task for the clinic staff, instead merely punting it downstream.

While the PMS companies often have their own online booking system, they are generally less feature-rich than third-party solutions. The business logic around offering “smart” availability, taking account of the appointment type and skill set or rules of the clinicians available, makes a huge difference. Because of this, most clinics in the UK use a provider such as VetBooker (now part of Digital Practice), Vetstoria or PetsApp.

One thing to be aware of, however, is that a fairly low ceiling appears to exist for the percentage of appointments customers will self-serve, likely because booking an appointment is often full of uncertainty for owners. They are often not sure if their pet needs to be seen, and if it does, when it should be seen, or even who it should be seen by. All of this uncertainty means that I would not expect to see a transformational shift in how appointments are booked from an online appointment booking system alone; however, any reduction in phone call volume can be hugely helpful in a busy clinic.

Practice apps

The idea of having an app sounds brilliant. Most of us spend most of our time on our phones, using apps. The app revolution has well and truly happened, and it seems logical that vets would want to get in on the action. Apps are a way to get straight into a user’s pocket, and if you have a well-designed app, you can have a fantastic experience for the user. Unfortunately, in reality, it is usually not quite the panacea – app retention rates are very low and competition on phones is high.

Millennials, on average, have 67 apps installed on their phones, although commonly fewer than half spend the vast majority of their time on just a few – primarily social media such as WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram and others. Only 25.6% of apps make it past one day on a iOS user’s phone, with only 4.3% lasting beyond day 30 (Statista). Android apps fare even worse. Even if you can get a customer to download your app, it is even harder to get them to keep it.

The barrier to get customers to engage with your app is very high, but the customer experience can be great. The most well known in the space is PetsApp, but some of the PMS companies have their own apps, such as MWI Pet. Being able to white label an app is a big plus, so that you are promoting your own brand rather than any third party.

One of the pitfalls is turning a trivial task such as “I want to pay a bill on my phone” into a more complex one by requiring an app download. The friction alone from this step can reduce completion rates and lower retention, so ensuring you have as engaging an app as possible can help. Building your own is an option if you are large enough, but can be a huge undertaking.

As with online booking, apps are a potential piece of the puzzle – only a certain percentage of your client base will interact using an app (likely significantly less than 50%). The remainder will want to communicate in other ways, such as using a responsive website, or even native messaging applications that they already use every day, such as WhatsApp and SMS.

Changing customer behaviour is really hard, and while we feel as a profession that we are very important in pet owners’ lives, the reality is that most will interact with us only a few times per year. We all know the feeling of turning up at a car park you visit infrequently, only to be forced to download yet another app just to pay.

Digital messaging

As touched on in the introduction, switching communications from being totally synchronous into asynchronous ones can have huge efficiency benefits for veterinary teams, as well as being highly attractive to younger pet owners. Not requiring customers to change their existing behaviour through downloading specific tools to communicate with you can ensure the highest levels of engagement. Using technologies such as WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger or Instagram can be hugely powerful. Rather than require a specific app, you meet your customers on the apps they already use every day.

Most PMSs will allow SMS – usually one way, but some will have a two-way implementation. One thing to look out for is high fees associated with this, as some PMSs use the SMS revenue to supplement their bottom line.

While SMS is useful, response rates to outbound messages from clinics are six times higher using WhatsApp than SMS, and coverage of these communication apps is near ubiquitous in the UK. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram all allow businesses to use their tool directly, but using a tool like Digital Practice can allow you to bring communications in from all these channels into one single dashboard that syncs with your PMS. Rich messages through these asynchronous platforms increase client bonding with the possibility of preop and postop photos or videos, and improved communication.

Payments can also be made with a single button press, with it even being possible to include a button in WhatsApp so the experience is much like a first-party app. Payments can be made with Apple Pay or Google Pay, meaning very high payment rates far exceeding SMS, and available to almost every customer on your books.

Remote care

COVID did not necessarily bring about a telemedicine revolution, but it certainly did cause an evolution in how remote clinical provision is delivered. Younger pet owners are much more engaged with virtual interactions than previous generations, and are comfortable with synchronous or asynchronous telemedicine.

While some insurers already direct pet owners to their own remote care providers, such as Joii or FirstVet, a worry can exist that this disintermediates the clinic from care provision and may reduce revenue for clinics. Using a remote system that drives pet owners back to their primary clinic for physical interactions or follow up can be preferred with a service such as VidiVet. This allows you to use remote vets as an additional resource, allowing you to focus your attention on clients who need to be seen physically, or even just using them for an additional OOH benefit. In the UK, Vetster, as well as Pawsquad and others, are available. Some PMS will also allow integration with a video provider or API to allow video consultations within or associated with the PMS.

Once again, a limit exists to what can benefit from telemedicine, as well as client expectations. As with practice apps, anything that requires a download or specific app can be a barrier, as well as the worry about promoting other brands than your own.

Conclusions

In summary, it is hard to find a simple solution that will solve all the potential customer use cases. What is really important is to find one (or many) that are able to focus on where you have key process improvements that can be reliably implemented in practice. It is all well and good purchasing all singing, all dancing, shiny technology, but if you cannot get staff and customers to embrace it then it is wasted. Focus on where your pain points are – such as being able to relieve the pressure on the phone lines – and pick the most appropriate tool for the job.

One other general comment when looking at this customer-facing tech is to take care reading the Ts and Cs, as well as the contracts. PMS integration is a wonderful thing, but if it enables a third party to scrape and then potentially resell your data, or even market to your customer base, that can be a significant concern. As this product directly links a third party to your customers, you need to make sure they stay your customer.

The market also moves quickly, so it is worth being aware of long contracts, as well as any tie-in that might come from taking on a new platform. You do not really want to roll over into a new 12-month contract if a new and better product comes on to the market during that time.