Communication between veterinary teams and clients extends far beyond the exam room. Between appointment confirmations, follow-up messages, pet care questions, and prescription requests, CSRs and clinical staff send and respond to dozens of messages every day. The tools your team uses to facilitate those interactions can either make them easier or more difficult.
Caitlin DeWilde, DVM, founder of The Social DVM, often helps clinics evaluate and implement these tools. She considers communication one of the most important features in a practice's tech stack.
“It’s your only other touchpoint with clients outside of exam room time, which happens only once or twice a year,” she said. “Communication needs to be a good experience."
With so many communication platforms now available to veterinary teams, choosing the right one can feel impossible. Dr. DeWilde pointed out that every clinic's needs are different. "There's no one product that does everything that you want, because what you want is different from what the clinic down the street wants,” she said. “You have to prioritize what is most important to you."
So what should veterinary teams look for in a communication platform? Here are three key areas to consider when evaluating a new tool, before or after adoption.
Personalization and quality
Generic reminders that read like system-generated codes aren’t ideal for building client relationships. Clients can see when messages are autogenerated and poorly edited, and they notice the lack of attention to detail.
Communication tools must allow teams to tailor messages so that clients feel cared for. Messages should convey a warm tone and a specific goal or need. For example, "Fluffy has some vaccination due dates coming up, please give us a call when you're ready to schedule,” has a conversational quality that leaves clients feeling positive about the upcoming visit.
Integration with your PIMS
Communication tools that operate outside your practice management software can create a variety of problems. Team members must log in to a separate platform, which makes it more difficult to access communication threads and increases the likelihood of errors or omissions when copying and pasting into the medical record.
Additionally, it’s likely that features of your PIMS and the separate veterinary communication platform overlap, and they might be doing double duty. Automated reminders going out twice can cause confusion for clients, and you might be paying for duplicate features you didn’t know you had.
Veterinary clinics can avoid these veterinary communication pitfalls by choosing tools that integrate completely (not just superficially) within your PIMS, or are built into them from the start.
Delegation and teamwork
When conveying information to pet owners or answering their questions, it’s critical that all team members have access to ongoing veterinary communication threads. If conversations are sequestered in one team member's inbox without others having access, it places an undue burden on that individual. Plus, if they’re off for the day or too busy to respond, other staff members can't step in to help.
Communication is a team sport, and the tool you choose to support your PIMS must give the entire team shared visibility into client conversations. Additional features to look for that encourage teamwork and delegation include the ability to:
- Assign a task or conversation to a team member or group
- Assign a priority level
- Adjust message or task status
Ensuring all team members can access communication threads and that they are presented in a logical, organized way prevents client and team frustrations.
Better communication is built in
Native PIMS communication tools are the best way to keep messaging organized and connected to related software features like scheduling, medical records, and billing. Provet's Conversations feature, for example, provides two-way SMS messaging directly within the PIMS. The system automatically routes incoming texts to client records, threads them into conversations, and allows the team to see all threads in real time.
Staff members working within the Provet PIMS can also assign conversations to specific team members, set priority levels, and mark threads as resolved without ever leaving the patient’s record. That means team members who talk with clients have access to relevant medical records so they can speak knowledgeably, prevent confusion, and avoid extra questions or headaches later.
Provet also tracks which staff member sends each message, giving teams an accurate record of who said what and when. Team members can watch conversations they aren't assigned to, staying informed without taking ownership. And a handy per-user unread-tracking feature ensures that when one person opens a message, it doesn't mark it as read for the rest of the team.
Communicating with clients through Provet
Provet's native Conversations feature keeps client messaging, patient records, scheduling, and billing in one place, so staff members can focus on delivering a great client experience. Plus, with personalization and automation options, you can ensure clients get the messages they need in a way that keeps them feeling connected with the practice.
Schedule a demo to see how our built-in veterinary communication tools can simplify tasks and improve the experience for your clients inside and outside of the exam room.
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