The goal of any veterinary practice is to be the resource for great pet care for pet owners in their area with questions and concerns. Because so many people view their pets as family members, it’s important that they can access quality care and get the information they need to keep their pets healthy and happy. To provide a high level of care and help pet parents when they need it, many vets are turning to texting to stay in touch with their patients.
Does Texting Actually Work for Veterinary Practices?
Is texting truly necessary in your practice? Simply put, it is the most efficient method of communicating with pet owners. Text messages are opened and acted upon at considerably higher rates than other modes of communication. Texting allows your pet owners to have fewer missed appointments, allows your office to have more efficient front-desk workers who aren't wasting time leaving voicemails, and gives you happier customers who value the convenience of texts.
Benefits of Texting for Veterinary Clinics
Texting can be a great solution for vet offices wanting to streamline their operations and bring their pet owners back to keep caring for animals. Let’s take a look at a few of the text messaging strategies used by vet offices to interact with pet owners.
Send Appointment Reminders
Veterinarians report a 9% no-show rate on average. That means one of your scheduled appointments won't show up for every 10 to 11 that you have each day. Text reminders have a significant impact on lowering this number. Even better, you can schedule recurring campaigns to send out automated reminders on a weekly or monthly basis to save your office staff even more time.
Improve Office Efficiency and Save TIme
Many people have “silence unknown callers” turned on, and about 90% of people don’t answer calls anymore. Because of this, veterinary hospitals can use text messaging to communicate with clients instead of using the phone, reducing the need for staff to leave voicemails and play endless phone tag.
Make It Easy to Ask and Answer Questions
Many veterinary professionals will text a patient in the event of an emergency or complication following surgery or treatment, or even just when patients have a question about administering medication to their pet. You can monitor incoming texts outside of business hours. So it's a great way to develop long-lasting relationships and trust.
Offer a Contactless Check-In Experience
With COVID-19 changing the way many people interact, crowded waiting rooms are not as common or comfortable anymore. With an easy-to-manage waitlist, texting can let your patients maintain social distance by waiting in their car until your staff is ready to see them.
How to Use Texting in Veterinary Offices
There are many different business texting tools out there, but you’ll want to find the one that has all the features you plan to use to make texting your patients easier.
You no longer have to sit down every morning and manually text every customer from your own phone or go back and forth calling to get in touch. You can utilize a business SMS platform to schedule texts, send mass texts, and automate the process. You can save time by using a service like TxtSquad to send these appointment scheduling or reminder messages. This is far more convenient than manually texting or calling each person, as your office employees probably do right now.
TxtSquad and other commercial SMS systems have two key features that can aid in appointment scheduling and follow up for vet offices: automated texting and two-way conversations.
Automatic texts, such as reminders or bulk texts, can be programmed to send out warnings about future appointments or mass alerts about new bargains and promotions. They are readily programmed and timed so that you can send them to everyone a day or two before their appointment or as soon as the next big sale is announced.
People can respond to you and message back and forth with you or another staff member via two-way dialogues. This is an excellent opportunity for them to ask questions about which service is most suited to their needs or to discuss their schedule so that you may book them at a convenient time. This also allows them to send a message whenever it is convenient for them, even if it is not during your office hours - and you may respond as soon as you are able the following day. It eliminates phone tag and the stress of waiting on hold.
Get Started with TxtSquad Today!
TxtSquad brings you all the benefits of business texting to your vet office and staff. You can have two way conversations to answer critical questions or check in after surgeries. You can schedule automated appointment reminders to reduce no shows. And you can even begin to offer a contactless check-in process for your office and patients. If you're ready to give texting a try, sign up for a demo today.