Using Veterinary Reminders to Maximize Your Clinic’s Growth

Running a veterinary clinic means you are constantly on the lookout for solutions that will simplify processes and make your hospital succeed. Utilizing appointment reminders is an approach that serves multiple purposes including boosting your clinic’s revenue, saving time, improving engagement with your customers and building your brand.

Let’s take a detailed look at why appointment reminders are absolutely necessary for a veterinary clinic to prosper.

Learn more about Weave’s veterinary appointment reminder software here.

Time Management

Effective time management is perhaps one of the biggest benefits of appointment reminders. How?

Spend less time on phone calls:

Without email or text appointment reminders, precious time is spent on calls with each individual customer, reminding them of their upcoming appointments. Because extra information sometimes needs to go out with those reminders (like a reminder to come with a particular document), calling can become even more time consuming. Digital appointment reminders take a lot less time to schedule and send, and they can also be set up to go out multiple times (a week before, the day before) all without any extra time spent on the phone.

Cut down on no-shows significantly:

A no-show is a customer that doesn’t turn up for his/her scheduled appointment. No-shows have a serious negative impact on time management as their absence means that, aside from walk-ins, the time slot allocated to them goes unused. Many studies have shown that appointment reminders can help to significantly reduce no-show numbers in clinics.

Maximize free time:

Automated reminders requires very minimal maintenance. This allows you to use clinic hours attending to customers rather than being on the phone.

Brand Building

Improve brand awareness:

Any form of interaction with your customers is an opportunity to build your brand. Digital veterinary clinic appointment reminders are completely customizable–you can include elements of your brand and its messaging in the reminders. Things like your clinic’s logo, tone and brand style will continually get reinforced with customers with each reminder they receive.

Improve brand image:

Your brand image (how your current and potential customers view your clinic) is affected when you send out appointment reminders. Reminders give your customers the impression that your clinic actually cares about their animals, and having this brand image means that you’ll likely develop a great reputation and increase first-time clinic visits.

Customer Engagement

Engagement with customers is generally reciprocated with increased customer cooperation. Any tool or process that involves some form of positive interaction with customers prompts them to think about the love that they have for their furry friends.

Push increased engagement:

With appointment reminders, customers are actively participating in the care of their animal by having to take action, such as confirming their appointments. Engaging them on that level also improves the chances that they will show up for their appointments more regularly, which is a positive decision for their pets and for your clinic. Veterinary clinic appointment reminders greatly improve the chances that customers will be up-to-date with and adhere to the care plans you have set out for their animals, which is one of the main goals of engagement and a crucial element in a clinic’s success.

Build trust:

Regularly reminding your customers of their appointments builds their trust in your clinic, as it shows a commitment to improving and maintaining the care of their animals. Having the trust of your customers has many benefits including the fact that they are more likely to stay loyal, continue using your clinic and refer you to their friends and family.

Customer Satisfaction

Having satisfied and happy customers is a weighty predictor of a clinic’s success. Implementing a reminder system is one of the simplest ways to keep your customers satisfied.

Cater to customer preference:

Customers generally prefer digital forms (email and text) of appointment reminders to phone calls and postcards. They don’t have to stop whatever they are doing at that moment to answer the phone; they can view and respond to the reminder when it’s convenient for them.

Simplify customer experience:

Veterinary appointment reminders make life easier for customers. Appointment reminder software like Weave is completely customizable. Your office can make it so customers don’t have to get on a phone call to cancel their appointments. They can simply respond ‘No’ or some other message to that effect.

Lastly, while it might seem negligible, the tiny ways you can personalize the appointment reminders you send out to customers can put smiles on their faces.

Staff Efficiency

Efficiency is achieved when energy, effort, time and money are not wasted in order to achieve the desired result. The job of the staff in a clinic is to ensure that the day-to-day administrative processes of the clinic are handled. Reminding customers of their appointments fall under this.

Achieve staff efficiency:

Appointment reminders help staff achieve efficiency because the time and energy they would otherwise have ‘wasted’ on calling each individual client can now be expended on other aspects of managing the clinic.

Prevent staff burnout:

Staff burnout is a serious concern, and any avenue that can be used to effectively reduce the workload of one’s staff should be pursued. Implementing appointment reminders for veterinary clinics means your staff can catch a much needed break.

Easy to implement:

Setting up reminders does not require a large degree of technical skill or any particular skill all. Your staff will not have to undergo hours of training- they can more or less take off running right out the gate.

Reduce disruption:

Efficiency and productivity are improved when tasks can be completed uninterrupted. With these appointment reminders, your staff can work on their other tasks without any disruptions in the form of phone calls to confirm appointments.

Better Quality of Care

Ensure uninterrupted episodes of care:

Customers not showing up for an appointment doesn’t just affect the administrative side of your practice. It affects the quality of the care you provide and patient outcomes too. Some procedures are reliant on multiple sessions and visits to be completely successful. Breaks in those visits may affect the final result of those multi-visit procedures. Reminders help to decrease the possibility of these missed appointments that detrimentally break up episodes of care.

Good health as a whole relies heavily on continuous maintenance. Using appointment reminders helps ensure that your patients come in for their check-ups regularly.

Receive better prepared patients:

These reminders also make certain that customers show up well prepared for their appointments. This has a direct positive effect on the quality of care you can deliver. For example, if you need to make sure that an animal does not eat for some hours preceding their visit, you can include that in the appointment reminder. This way, when your patient arrives, everything is in place for you to focus on delivering excellent care.

Revenue Increase

Maximize clinic hours:

A reduction in no-shows means an increase in your clinic’s bottom line as you get to see as many patients as can comfortably fit into your clinic hours as possible.

Expand customer base:

If you don’t have staff handling it for you, you can schedule your clinic’s appointment reminders after hours or on weekends. This allows you to maximize your active clinic hours. More clinic hours means the ability to see more patients, and that directly translates to an increase in revenue.

Tap into free marketing:

Factors like customer satisfaction and better patient outcomes which have already been positively impacted by appointment reminders can also directly increase your revenue. Satisfying your customers and having favorable patient outcomes means that your existing customers are more likely to refer your clinic to their friends, family and colleagues.

Conclusion

You have just read more than a dozen reasons why Weave customers everywhere are loving the reminder system capabilities that Weave offers. Seeing how Weave can be tailored to your clinic is even more eye opening than reading all of the great things that it can do. Schedule a demo today to find out all of the things that Weave can offer to your clinic.