Five ways your clients benefit from a vet’s answering service
There are lots of benefits to using a vet’s answering service: there are staff benefits, there are business benefits, and there are benefits to your customers. Here are a few ways to use a dedicated vet’s answering service to benefit your customers.
1. A vet’s answering service can improve customer retention
One of the most common reasons for a pet owner to move vets is due to concerns over customer service and their experience with emergency calls. If a pet owner is unable to get through to your practice when they are genuinely concerned for their pet’s wellbeing, they are likely to try calling other local vets. If this happens, they are highly likely to move to whichever vet practice they feel can provide them with that quick service.
A vet’s answering service ensures your practice never misses a call and quickly answers calls. Customers will value this efficient and reliable service, which improves their satisfaction levels, making them far less likely to go looking for another vet practice.
2. Your customer care can be improved by using our service
Having a dedicated vet’s messaging service means your customers never have to be rerouted to another vet practice, which ensures that you can provide the best possible customer care. Depending on how you choose to set up your answering service with us, we could operate as an extension of your reception team. This means we can reassure and care for customers exactly as suits their needs. As such, we can provide a personal service that improves customer satisfaction.
We can also provide a buffer between the vets, and the customers, which is useful when dealing with non-emergency enquires that the customers see as a more significant issue than it truly is. At the end of the day, vets are there to care for the animals, but we can be there to care for their owners.
3. Reduce customer stress over automation
When you are worried about your pet, you are unlikely to be calm and controlled. This can mean shouting at an automated call service desperately trying to get through to a real person. Automated calls can work well for some businesses, but for vet practices, they are unlikely to win you any customers.
Using our vet’s answering service, your customers get straight through to a real person who can listen to their situation and help calm them while getting through to the appropriate vet. By providing this calm customer handling process, we can reduce customers’ stress levels and ensure we have collected all the relevant information for the vets so they can deal with the situation as efficiently as possible.
4. Provide a 24-hour answering service with a vet’s answering service
One of pet owners’ biggest concerns is ensuring they can get hold of their vet practice in an emergency. Emergencies inevitably occur outside of normal hours, whether on Sundays at 6 am or Wednesdays at 1 am. Customers want to know they can contact their vet practice whenever they need to. By using a vet answering service, you can provide 24-hour phone cover, so you never miss a call, and your customers can always get hold of their vet during an emergency.
Outsourcing this 24-hour call cover to us also allows you to reduce the need for reception staff outside of normal hours. Additionally, it improves how emergency calls are dealt with by providing a buffer between the on-call vet and the customer, giving the vet thinking time to wake up and evaluate the situation before speaking to the customer directly.
5. Improve customer–vet communication by using our service
Let’s be honest; most vets didn’t become vets to speak to customers; they became vets because they love animals. In fact, I would argue that most vets became vets rather than doctors because they prefer animals to people. Unfortunately for most vets, that is, unless you are some sort of wildlife vet, most animals have an owner attached to them. This means being a vet involves almost as much people management as animal management.
Vets aren’t always the best at dealing with customers. This might be because they disagree with the owner’s animal husbandry choices, or they might find the person an added stress to an already difficult situation, or maybe they just aren’t a people person.
Having a vet’s answering service allows your vets to do what they are good at – treating the animals – while we deal with the stuff we are good at – managing the people. We can offer that buffer between the customers and the vets to help the vets but also ensure better communication between vets and customers. We can ensure all the appropriate information is collected and transmitted in such a way that both parties understand. Whether that is filtering out unhelpful information when talking to a customer about an emergency or passing on information from the vet to the customer.
Get in touch with the team to learn more about our service.