Saddle Up for Seamless Communication: Digital Practice for Equine Vets
In equine veterinary care, where vets are often on the road, client communication is key. This often leads to vets and clients communicating via the vets’ personal WhatsApp. That works OK of course, but it’s not ideal, it’s messy and keeping the PMS updated takes some effort. The clients love it though. So how to keep the clients happy, while helping the vets and the whole practice team manage the client comms better…
Fear not, for Digital Practice is here to rein in those communication woes and steer your practice towards smoother operations.
Who is using Digital Practice?
Digital Practice is used by over 400 vet practices, including equine practices using it to digitise their client comms. In this video, Ryan McCarthy, Partner at GVG Brooks Equine Vets, talks about the main benefits of Digital Practice for him and the team.
What is Digital Practice?
In a nutshell, a tool for managing your client communications and payments digitally. Open Digital Practice on your phone or computer browser. Clients message into the practice via their preferred app, be it WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger or Instagram, your PMS finds the client and you get to see their message alongside the client and patient details. Similarly you can choose a client to send a message to and they’ll engage fast thanks to the nature of messaging apps.
Messages can include images, videos, PDFs, voice notes and everything else you’d expect - for an equine practice you can see why that would be game changing (no more videos to your personal phone! No more files too large for an email!).
Payment links can be sent and paid via Apple Pay, Google Pay and card, and appointments can be booked too. Vets can manage all of this on the road while the reception team can manage it at the same time from their computers.
How can we help equine practices specifically?
At Digital Practice, we understand the unique challenges faced by equine vets when it come to client comms (in fact we have an equine vet, Alice, on the team), and we're here to help you overcome them. We know that lots of your clients already love using WhastApp to communicate with you, so let's take a closer look at some of the biggest pain points for equine vets and how Digital Practice addresses them, without asking your client to change their behaviour:
Zone Visit Organisation Made Easy:
Organising zone visits is a time-consuming task, especially when clients are difficult to reach by phone. Digital Practice simplifies this process by enabling communication through WhatsApp. Messages are sent instantly, templates can be created and saved so writing them is also pretty instant, and you’ll always know if a client has seen the message because blue ticks indicate when the message has been read. No more leaving voicemails and hoping the client will be there!
Triage Management:
Clients will often want to send videos and images directly to their vet to triage a fat leg, (a wound, a swollen eye... if you know horses, you'll know the drill), leading to a flood of media files clogging up your personal WhatsApp. These are often difficult to deal with while out on the road and vets are very rarely best placed to know who's free and close-by to deal with the call. Digital Practice provides a dedicated practice WhatsApp number, allowing clients to send media files directly to the practice. This ensures that the appropriate staff member can address the query promptly, without inundating personal inboxes, and get the client seen in the most efficient way.
Rapid Reporting of Worm Egg Count Results:
Reporting worm egg count results and providing worming advice over the phone regularly takes masses of time. This becomes a lot faster when it’s done via a messaging platform - and that messaging platform is synced with your PMS! You can send and receive those routine messages fast, get replies when your clients have time, and manage it all properly on your PMS.
Efficient Monitoring of Cases:
Asking clients to send videos of their horse trotting up for assessing lameness case progress is all too common practice. However, sharing personal WhatsApp numbers and storing these videos outside of the practice management system poses privacy and data management concerns, it clogs up your phone and they're hard to find and refer back to at a later date. And don't get us started with the woes of attaching trot-up videos to emails. With Digital Practice, clients can send these videos directly to the practice WhatsApp number, ensuring they’re seen by the right vet at a time that suits, and saved securely on the PMS.
Taking payment in advance
When it comes to new clients, or bad debtors, it makes sense to grab payment during the visit. Send payment links via Digital Practice and clients can pay on their phone then and there.
Ryan McCarthy, Partner at GVG Brooks Equine Vets says “we use it [the payment feature on Digital Practice] routinely for our zone days, we’ll indicate the time of their visit and the cost via Digital Practice and take payment through there which removes the need for the vet to take payment.”
Summary
By leveraging WhatsApp communication properly, equine practices can overcome common pain points and provide more efficient and effective care to their clients and patients. This works specifically well for in the world of equine because WhatsApp is often already utilised for your client comms, now you can just use it way more efficiently.
Are you ready to revolutionise your client communication with Digital Practice? Contact us today to learn more and schedule a demonstration.
