5 Reasons Your Veterinary Practice Needs Online Appointment Booking

Here are 5 reasons why your veterinary practice needs online appointment booking:

1. Calendar visibility takes away the guesswork

Simply put, direct-to-schedule appointment booking allows your clients to view what dates and times are available based on rules and availability you’ve established. Clients then book the appointment, which goes directly onto your practice scheduler, It’s that easy. This also eliminates any back-and-forth friction between your front desk staff and clients that often comes with a generic “appointment request” type feature.

“VitusVet direct booking has provided us the ability to reduce the amount of time our team spends scheduling and confirming appointments with our clients,” said Chad Cox, EVP of The Pet Vet based in Frisco, Texas. “ It has allowed our clients to see our schedule and create an appointment at a time that is convenient for them without having to pick up the phone and call while at the same time giving us all of the client and patient related information needed in order for us to provide the best service possible in our hospital.”

2. Client convenience is king

Your clients are now able to book appointments 24/7, when it is most convenient for them. It’s the ultimate client experience; similar to the feel of Uber and OpenTable or other client-centered multi-billion dollar companies. Your clients in many ways expect this type of service in 2018 and now you have the ability to offer it to them. Of course, taking advantage of this technology doesn’t stop your veterinary practice from still using a phone-based booking system. It simply means that for pet parents who prefer it, they can book instantly on their own time through their device of choice. For pet parents and the practice, it’s a no-brainer.

3. Things have changed

It’s a new way of doing business, and change is hard. We get it. Nothing ruins your day faster than clients showing up thinking they have an appointment when they do not. We completely understand and have built in rules and logic to prevent this from happening while adding capacity. Rather than being constrained by working hours and limitations of the telephone, this allows practices to take countless bookings at any moment, offering a far superior advantage than alternative booking systems present.

“At THRIVE, we operate a very unique model for how to schedule specific types of appointments,” said Benjamin Trotter, VP of Marketing at THRIVE Affordable Vet Care. “It was important for us to have an online scheduler that aligned with the realities of the availability in-clinic, and VitusVet’s implementation was able to increase our capacity of online bookings with thoughtful logic specific to our veterinary care model.”

4. The hidden cost of the telephone

We also typically don’t allow pet parents to book appointments for sick pets, as it’s usually a good idea for one of your team members to do a “telephone triage” on the patient to see if it’s an emergency or not. Bearing in mind those exceptions, the majority of your appointments can (and should) be made digitally. Most would agree there are far better uses for a team members valuable time than scheduling a nail trim or other routine wellness visit. Imagine what your client service reps could accomplish if they had 40% (or more) of their time back; the time that they’re now spending on the telephone with pet parents who likely didn’t want to have to call the practice in the first place.

5. More appointments, more revenue