Cut Costs and Improve Efficiency with Vetstoria Pay
Table of Contents
Cost savings AND fewer no-shows at your veterinary clinic? Yes, please!
Handling payments can be a significant challenge for veterinary clinics. High processing fees and the complexity of multiple payment providers can slow down operations and affect revenue. That's why our team has been working on something exciting to support you!
First of all, Vetstoria online payments is getting a new name—we’re now Vetstoria Pay, and what’s else? We’re partnering with top payment providers to make online and in-clinic payments more accessible through a single payment provider.*
Why Vetstoria Pay is Great for Your Clinic:
Significant Cost Savings
With Vetstoria Pay, you could save money with market-leading rates for both in-clinic and online transactions.* Lower fees mean more resources to invest back into your clinic and enhance patient care.
One Trusted Payment Provider
Managing multiple payment providers can be a hassle, especially if you use one for online and another for face-to-face transactions. Now, you can simplify your payment management by relying on a single, trusted payment provider.* This ensures consistency and convenience for both your clinic and your clients.
Reduce No-Shows and Improve Payment Collection
Integrating payments into the booking process helps reduce no-shows. Pet owners are more likely to honour their appointments if they have paid ahead, leading to a more predictable schedule and guaranteed revenue. This also streamlines payment collection, making the entire process easier for your staff.
Experience the Benefits Today
Vetstoria Pay can transform how you handle payments by reducing costs, simplifying payment processes, and improving overall efficiency. If you want to learn how our online booking platform and payments can help you save money, reduce no-shows, or chat about which payment providers we partner with, please get in touch!
*Market leading rates and single payment provider or in-clinic and online transactions may vary based on payment provider and region.
6 Ways Veterinary Practices Use Vetstoria to Maintain Control of Their Schedules
To be able to maintain control of their schedule is important for every veterinary practice manager or owner. Because each clinic is unique in how it’s run.
So, what does it mean to maintain control of your schedule?
- Appointments are booked based on clinicians' availability and your convenience.
- Ample time is left for walk-ins, emergencies, or surgeries.
- The right appointments are booked at the right time. (For example, if an appointment for a sick pet is scheduled later in the day, you would likely have to stay open late.)
This is why you might have the following concerns when adopting online booking for your practice.
- “What if online scheduling overbooks our calendars?”
- “What if we completely run out of the little time we have?”
- “What if pet owners book the wrong type of appointment at the wrong time?”
- “How can online booking mirror how my practice is run internally?”
We’ve addressed these very common concerns in our blog here. TL:DR Vetstoria offers numerous customizations and rules to ensure you have a say in the way you make your practice available to pet owners.
And that’s what we will cover in this post.
Listen to Lilliana Mercado from Petsadena Animal Hospital talk about how Vetstoria’s customizations help her practice.
Pet owners make their online appointments based on your custom availability. It’s a win-win.
But how exactly does Vetstoria do this? And how does it help you maintain control?
Firstly, Vetstoria integrates with your Practice Management Software (PIMS or PMS), so the time slots you show to your customers align with what you want to offer. We integrate with over 20 PIMS, and you should be able to find yours here.
“The fact that it integrates with Cornerstone is a huge sell, and the various customizations you can do on the platform are great. Plus, it’s super easy to use!”
- Lindsay Ward, Practice Manager at Bay Country Veterinary Hospital
So how can you further tailor appointments to your practice?
1. Maintain control by customizing appointment durations
AniCura, which boasts 350 locations across Northern and Western Europe, takes complete advantage of the various customizations and rules that Vetstoria offers. This includes personalizing appointment types, duration, clinician preference, time-slot blocking, and more.
“90% of bookings are 20-minute vaccinations and 30-minute ear checks. Monday and Friday afternoons are blocked for online booking so there’s flexibility for emergencies.”
- Libbe Soelbeck, Veterinary Nurse at AniCura Varde in Denmark
With this customization, pet owners don’t decide the duration of the appointment — you do. This is one of the ways they are able to maintain control of their diary.
2. Maintain control by excluding time slots you don’t want to offer
With this feature, you can add which times and dates you presume will be extremely busy, and block out a section of your schedule. So when pet owners want to book an appointment, these time slots you blocked or “excluded” don’t appear on Vetstoria.
Plus you may have noticed that AniCura blocks afternoons for emergencies. Using our “slot exclusions” feature, you can do this too. This is one of the ways they are able to maintain control of their diary.
3. Add a limit or a quota per appointment type or service you offer
With Vetstoria, you can configure “appointment types” based on the services you offer. This way, pet owners can select the reason for their appointment and you will be able to maintain control of the schedule.
With Vetstoria’s “maximum appointments” feature, you can specify how many appointments per appointment type you want to offer per day.
For example, if you want to offer a max of 10 vaccination appointment slots per day, pet owners also will need to choose from the 10 slots you offer. This is another way clinics can maintain control of their diaries.
4. Maintain control by holding enough time between appointments
Vetstoria offers a feature called “gap to the earliest slot.” This helps to reserve enough time in between appointments. For example, if you want to leave enough room before an appointment for the patient to arrive, you would want to leave a considerable amount of time between appointments - preventing the pet owner from booking an appointment that either they won't be able to make in time, or that you won't have enough time to prepare for. Utilizing the "gap to earliest slot" feature is a great way to maintain control of your diary.
5. Use appointment screening to triage emergencies
In most cases, your front-desk team has to think on their feet to decide whether an appointment request is an emergency that requires immediate attention.
With Vetstoria’s appointment screening capabilities, you can add keywords that indicate an emergency (such as bleeding, vomiting, etc.). When pet owners mention these terms as a reason for their visit, they are notified to call the clinic instead. By automating which appointments should be treated as emergencies, this feature makes it easy for a practice to maintain control and saves time for your team.
Read how Bay Country Veterinary Hospital uses Vetstoria to screen their appointments and maintain control of their diary.
6. Reduce no-shows with online payments
No-shows are an awful waste of time. Adding online payments can help you control the number of no-shows your practice will have to cope with. With Vetstoria’s online payments, payment collection happens automatically after pet owners book their appointments online — like online shopping.
Anglesey Pet Clinic saves £2K monthly by tackling no-shows with Vetstoria. After paying in advance (full payment or deposit), the pet owner would be sure to arrive for their appointment, and your team can reduce the amount of time they spend collecting payments. This is another way your team are able to maintain control of your diary.
Bonus: Options for managing new clients effectively
There’s a lot you can do to provide services to new clients based on your capacity. Here are some ways you can leverage Vetstoria to help you.
- Set which appointment types to make available for new clients.
- Adjust the duration for new clients as well as the number of appointments you offer a day. (See “maximum appointments.”)
- Enable the new-client form to automate data collection. You can even enable “previous vet details,” so all this information is collected during online booking.
These are a few popular ones, but there’s a lot more to unpack.
To be able to maintain control is key for your practice, which is why 6,000 practices globally have chosen to use Vetstoria. Want to explore other features that can help your clinic? Book your demo now!
We Revamped Our Booking Experience!
In a nutshell: Our new look is built on the latest design standards, so it’s extra mobile friendly, web accessibility compliant and has faster loading times. We also updated our new client form so you can get additional information from new pet owners and ensure they share it before they complete their online booking.
A good user experience can help increase website conversions by 200%. Also, users are 5 times more likely to abandon a task if the site is not optimized for mobile. As always, we want to continue making online booking appointments as easy as possible for pet owners. And that would mean fewer phone calls for you.
So, what did we change?
We completely revamped our pet owner online booking experience (user interface) using the latest design standards.
This means,
- That the online booking platform is extra mobile-friendly, improving the display of time slots you offer to pet owners. This includes seeing the first available slot as soon as the time selection screen loads and which days have availability.
- The platform looks extra sleek and modern. So it aligns well with the look of your website.
- Web Accessibility Compliant so even more pet owners can easily access online booking.
The revamp also facilitated a change you wanted us to make to the new client form.
What’s new with the new client form
Previously, the new client form appeared after pet owners confirmed the appointment, which caused a few drop-offs. Now, the new client information is collected before pet owners confirm their appointment.
We added extra fields like previous vet or doctor details, date of birth or age of the pet and even capture consent to share marketing information and sign up for wellness plans. This makes it easier to reach out to pet owners for future communication.
Why is this revamp good for your practice?
Mobile bookings are continuing to increase - our data in 2022 shows that 63% of pet owners make their online bookings via a mobile device, so improving the mobile-friendliness of our platform is a step in the right direction.
- Improved visual design that fits better with modern websites like yours.
- Pet owners will find it easier to use it on more devices.
- Reduce drop-offs with an improved display of time slot availability (New time slot screen design).
- Increase new client form completion rates enabling pet owners to share their information before confirming the appointment.
We’d love to hear what you think of the booking experience, let us know at support@vetstoria.com. If you want to read about why you need a real-time online scheduling software, click here.
If you’re new to Vetstoria - feel free to book a demo, and we will show you how it can help your practice become a digital-friendly practice for pet owners.
How to Get Pet Owners to Book Appointments Online
Let’s assume you’ve decided to adopt a platform like Vetstoria for real-time appointment scheduling. This means pet owners can book appointments based on the rules you add and the time slots you offer. When they do this, there are drastically fewer phone calls to respond to, and that’s great!
Over 70% of pet owners prefer to book appointments online anyway. But how can you let pet owners know that you too offer online booking so pet owners discover you easily?
A clear call to action on your website
Once pet owners visit your website, how easy is it for them to book an appointment? Is the button clear and easy to find?
We recommend having a button that says “Book an appointment online” or “Book online” situated clearly on the home page. This might be in the top-right corner so pet owners can easily access the booking widget.
Here are some examples of how it could look.
Activate your floating button on your appointment scheduling platform
By enabling the floating button, you can help pet owners make bookings easily while they browse through your website — especially if they missed the “Book online” button. (It’s unlikely, but it’s always good to offer multiple options!)
Our users see at least 13% of their total appointments come through the floating button. This means pet owners find it easy to locate booking links, which further reduces calls.
The button’s text can be customized based on your preferences, and you can set up a delay, so it appears after a visitor has been on the website for a certain amount of time. You can also position the button to appear in any corner of the page.
Learn more about the floating button
Leverage your Google My Business page
We all run a search on Google before we land on any website. Along with the search results, the link to your Google My Business page could be the first thing pet owners see. If you’re yet to open a Google My Business account, here’s how to do it.
Once you create your Google My Business page, you can add your unique booking links to it to book appointments directly.
Add your business through Google Maps
- On your computer, sign in to Google Maps.
- You can add your business in three steps:
- Enter your address in the search bar. In the Business Profile on the left, click Add your business.
- Right-click anywhere on the map. Then, click Add your business.
- On the top-left of the screen, click Menu and then Add your business.
- Follow the on-screen instructions to finish signing up for your Business Profile.
Embed booking links into your social accounts
Want pet owners to book appointments through your Facebook or Instagram account?
At least 56% of consumers now look for products and services through Instagram. You can add a link to your bio that pet owners can click to book online. You can do the same with Facebook, Yelp, or any other social media account you use.
Announce it on social media
In addition to embedding booking links into your social media accounts, you can add banners or cover photos to announce that you offer online booking. You can display cover photos on your LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or even a quick clip on TikTok to show how to book an appointment online. We love this clip, made by one of our users on Instagram, which shows how pet owners can easily do this.
Add a hold message to your hotline
In the event pet owners do call your practice, why not add a message asking them to book online? The message can also include a directive to stay on the line if it’s an emergency.
Here’s an example of audio clips you can add to your hotline.
Go old-school with posters
Add a sticker on your office door with your QR code mentioning that you now offer online booking. You can also display posters in your practice to explain that, with appointment scheduling available, there’s no longer a need to wait on hold!
Need some inspiration? Check out our vet vault for helpful materials.
Vetstoria Now Integrates with VetSCOPE
We are elated to announce that Vetstoria can now integrate with VetSCOPE, the leading provider of veterinary practice management systems with over 1,000 users across Ireland and the U.K.
Veterinarians in the region, particularly those who treat small animals, will save hours of admin time every week, enabling the front-desk staff to focus more on patient care and less on the phone.
If you’re a VetSCOPE user, here’s why adding Vetstoria would help your practice.
- Reduce admin stress with automated online appointment scheduling.
With Vetstoria, you can offer 24/7 automated appointment scheduling, reminders, and confirmations. This helps reduce the number of phone calls you receive daily.
- Improve pet-owner experience.
Our data says that over 70% of pet owners like booking online. This helps pet owners directly book appointments without any staff intervention and gives them instant confirmation.
- Increase revenue for your practice.
Online appointments mean pet owners can book anytime, including outside of regular business hours, to book appointments. Add payments to each appointment type, and you will be stacking up more revenue for your practice in no time.
How does connecting VetSCOPE and Vetstoria work?
- Real-time calendar sync between Vetstoria and VetSCOPE
Our team will help you connect Vetstoria with VetSCOPE to provide real-time availability to pet owners. No double-booking, and pet owners get instant appointment confirmation.
- Gain control with scheduling rules.
Often, online booking can create some anxiety because your practice is sharing your availability. What if pet owners take up all the time slots you have? Vetstoria offers the capability to customize or set rules to keep control of your availability. These range from how you want to provide your available time slots to customizing per each clinician’s preferences, including which species they wish to treat.
- Get social and increase visibility.
Integrate your practice website with Vetstoria and add the direct booking link to your social channels, email campaigns, and text messages, so pet owners have many channels to book appointments — all of which are reflected instantly in VetSCOPE.
About the integration, Stephen Lawler, the CEO of VetSCOPE, said,
“An online booking system that frees up busy administration staff has been a request from our customers. We have worked with the leading online booking system in the world, Vetstoria, to provide the link to VetSCOPE. Clients may now make appointments on their veterinary practice website, and the appointment will appear directly in the VetSCOPE calendar within specified rules, keeping you in control. This can be a game-changer in many practices that are struggling to cope with increased demand in small-animal appointments in recent years.”
- Stephen Lawler, CEO of VetSCOPE
This integration has been highly anticipated, as explained by our CEO, Julien Renard:
“It’s fantastic that we are able to announce the partnership. We have heard positive feedback from mutual clients so far. I’m sure more and more clinics will join and start benefiting from the integration, which our engineers on both sides have done a great job on.”
- Dr Julien Renard, CEO of Vetstoria
There will be technical requirements involved for some clinics. The best way to start is by booking a quick 10-minute call with one of our product specialists for a demo, where you can explore the options.
If you are using VetSCOPE and would like to learn more, book a demo now.
4 Ways to Increase Veterinary Marketing ROI with Vetstoria
Identifying the results from your veterinary marketing spend or conducting an attributional analysis is no walk in the (dog?) park. It’s tough when your campaigns act as multiple touchpoints until a pet owner becomes a new customer, so you aren’t certain of your traffic sources.
And it becomes a tedious process when your team is overseeing a large number of practices with various circumstances and sizes. Your goal for each practice likely differs: some may want to optimize their existing operations, one may want to get more customers. Either way, you’d like to see all your practices grow and ensure that growth is scalable.
So, how do you ensure that you get the most out of your veterinary marketing promotions? Vetstoria has some great features inbuilt for digital marketing and analytics, so here’s how you can use them to make the most of your marketing efforts.
1. Get a deep understanding of pet owner behavior with Vetstoria analytics.
To measure the ROI of your campaign, you would need to pay attention to metrics like the number of new users or new pet owners to each practice, time spent on each of your practice websites, the appointments’ origins, cost per click or lead (depending on which you measure), and conversions from each source.
With Vetstoria, most practices find out that 30% to 40% of their total appointments are made outside of office hours. This means that pet owners book appointments at convenient times for them. And that’s just one of the statistics you’ll learn from our dashboard.
With our analytics and reporting capabilities, you can discover the best time to run promotions — including the most optimal day of the week. You can learn the time most appointments are booked, the date of the week, and so on.
You also get to identify results like the origin of your appointments, so you know which channel was the most effective. You’ll also be able to note the devices from which they book appointments and whether they dropped out from the booking process at any stage. This helps to identify which steps of the booking process your practices need to improve so you do not lose out on any revenue.
All of this data can then be fed back into your existing campaigns to target your promotions better and ensure your team maximizes campaign results.
2. Formulate predictive analytics using insights from the corporate dashboard.
Once you’re on board with Vetstoria, you get to see all of the data pertaining to your many practices under a custom corporate dashboard. These range from the total number of appointments to new clients, complete dropout analysis, appointments made outside of office hours, and more. Each of the corporate dashboard graphs can be exported, so your teams can work to interpret these insights with our customer success team.
This data can also be derived on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, so you can see specific trends and patterns in pet owner behavior and then apply them to your marketing activities. During quarterly performance reviews with our customer success team, you will also get to discuss benchmarking data and aggregated anonymized data of the practices within your group to get an understanding of the average number of total appointments, new clients, and bookings made outside of office hours.
The corporate dashboard also helps you form predictions and trends about pet owners so that you can spend your marketing budgets wisely.
3. Set the right campaign goals with our campaign link builder for effective veterinary marketing.
With Vetstoria’s campaign link builder, you can determine the campaign’s purpose and decide on the call to action you’d like pet owners to take.
Once you click “Create a campaign,” the fields allow you to input details such as the name of the campaign, payments (if applicable), the appointment type you want to offer, and the duration of the campaign. Further, you can specify whether you’re looking to treat just one type of species and even which vet will be providing treatments. Vetstoria’s analytics help you discover which species get the greatest number of appointments as well as the most booked vet. This could be an opportunity to boost those underutilized time slots of any practice within your group.
These are just a few of the various rules and customizations at your disposal to make the promotion as specific as possible.
4. Explore various channels and make it easy to take action with our integrated links.
To improve your veterinary marketing ROI, you would want to run tests — and on as many channels as possible. The campaign smart links you create via our digital marketing feature can be linked to various social channels, including Google My Business, Instagram, and Facebook, to name a few. A highlight of this feature is that these links are tracked via Vetstoria’s analytics dashboard to help you understand how well the campaign performed, i.e., the number of appointments that pet owners book via the campaign link. You can also identify such results as the origin of your appointments, so you know which channel was the most effective.
Not only can your teams add campaign links on social media promos, but you can also embed the Vetstoria booking link directly in your social media channels. Vetstoria offers integrated booking links under the settings of the Vetstoria dashboard. These can be added as a “Book now” button on each channel to take pet owners directly to the booking widget. This makes it easier for pet owners to access the booking tool or platform, reducing each practice’s volume of phone calls. The keys are to increase your practices’ visibility as much as possible and help pet owners take action as soon as they discover one.
So, what’s next?
Increasing your veterinary marketing ROI across your group is tedious because each practice behaves differently based on its location and user preferences. Platforms like Vetstoria streamline managing multiple practices by offering an excellent grasp of user behavior via our analytics and helping you run campaigns efficiently with digital marketing. Learn more about it here.
If you want to learn about the specific analytics and data available to you, feel free to download this quick guide.
Getting the Most of Your Veterinary Practice’s Marketing Spend
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me how many clients or pet owners I got from a campaign… I’d reinvest those dollars back into it. But to ensure you’re getting a better budget for the upcoming year, you need to be able to prove the return you got for your marketing costs. But let’s break this down.
What is ROI on marketing spend?
Return on investment (ROI) is a percentage of what you earn over your marketing costs or investment. For example, you want to ensure the return that you get on your spending is high, and, in the case of advertising, how many dollars you are earning for every dollar you spend. Converting this to a percentage is your ROI. Ideally, you would want to witness a positive ROI or return on your marketing spend — more dollars per dollar you spend (source).
So, how do you ensure that you’ll get the most out of the marketing promotions you run?
1. Set your marketing goals and the right call to action.
What do you most want to get out of your marketing campaigns? Increased visibility? New clients? McKinsey explains that the better the marketing objectives, the better the metrics. And the more you map this on your customers’ or pet owners’ journeys, the more likely you are to see good results.
To establish your goals and marketing plan, conduct a SWOT analysis and competitor analysis to determine the strength of your practice. Once you do, these goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) can be fed into your marketing activities, ensuring that you conduct the appropriate campaign or promotion. What would be a typical list of KPIs you’d want to look for? You could get started with a list that includes:
● Revenue.
● Growth rate.
● Cost per lead or pet owner.
● Organic traffic.
Once you identify these, Vetstoria’s digital marketing feature helps you determine what kind of campaign you’ll want to run and for what purpose. With all the customizations coming in, you will have a streamlined focus on what to expect from the outcome of your campaign, helping you make the most out of it.
Most importantly, what actions do you want pet owners to take? Usually, you want them to book an appointment. Our campaign link builder helps you create smart links with specific actions (e.g.., “book an appointment”) so that pet owners take that action and decide which practice they want to make an appointment with.
2. Understand how your audience behaves and target the right pet owners.
Without the right audience, you would be shooting in the dark, hoping something catches on. Understanding your target audience of pet owners, the online channels they hang out on, and their general interests are essential to your overall marketing plan. It’s also one of the key ways to ensure you increase your return on marketing spend.
We know that 81% of pet owners prefer booking online, and 79% use mobile devices to do so. If you were to refer to a report like “We are social,” you would understand the various social media pet owners consume. For example, there are 600 million users on Instagram that spend at least an hour on the platform per day.
With Vetstoria’s campaign link builder, you can add rules and customizations to narrow down the promotion period, appointment type, and the species you’re looking to treat. These links then can be placed in the channel(s) of your choice — be it Instagram, Facebook, etc. — and then tracked via Vetstoria’s analytics dashboard to understand how the campaign has performed, i.e., the number of appointments pet owners book via the link. The link builder makes it easy to place these booking links on various channels and get the most out of your campaigns.
Vetstoria also offers integrated booking links in the settings of the Vetstoria dashboard. These can be placed or added as a “Book now” button on each channel to take pet owners directly to the booking widget. This link makes it easier for pet owners to access the booking tool or platform, reducing your practice’s volume of phone calls.
3. Measure, review, and revise.
Analytics plays a significant role in your campaigns.
To measure your campaign’s ROI, you would need to pay attention to such metrics as the number of new users or new pet owners, time spent on each of your practice websites, origins of appointments, cost per click or lead (depending on which you measure), and conversions from each source.
With Vetstoria, most practices discover that 30-40% of their appointments are made outside of office hours. This means that pet owners make appointments during their free time.
Our analytics and reporting capabilities define the best times to run promotions, so you stay at the top of pet owners’ minds. You also get to identify results like the source of your appointments, the device with which they make them, and even which days of the week are most popular for appointment booking. You can leverage all these insights to maximize the outcome of your campaign.
So, what’s next?
Measuring the return of your marketing spend is a tedious process. This complexity is why platforms like Vetstoria offer users an excellent grasp of pet owner behavior via our analytics feature. Learn more about it here.
If you’re getting a start on how digital marketing with Vetstoria works, here’s a good resource for you to get a head start on your campaigns. If you have any other questions about how Vetstoria works, reach out at any time!
The Key to Modernizing Practices in Your Veterinary Group
Veterinary groups and practice consolidators focus on effectively managing all practices and ensuring the growth is scalable. While all operations are centralized, veterinary groups can massively benefit through automation at each of the practices. This is why an appointment scheduling software plays a central role.
The emergence of online booking
Every industry out there now offers online booking. Businesses ranging from airlines to hairdressers, cinemas, and restaurants can all book seats or appointments online. That makes us wonder how “request an appointment” tools or even being on hold on your phone are still accepted methods. Imagine a scenario in which you had to request a seat from an airline. You might have to spend some time going back and forth to get the right seat confirmed. It would be easier for you to get to your destination by kayak instead. This is the experience of an “appointment request tool” for pet owners.
The same applies if you want an appointment with a hairdresser, as this blog illustrates beautifully. As customers, we love to have choices, and tools like “request an appointment” limit that — and create additional work for practice teams. It’s far ideal to see the options available to you so you can book it online and get instant confirmation.
Pet owners — your customers — expect no less.
Why should your practices opt for an appointment scheduling software?
● Improved pet owner experience. Customers prefer to book online and get instant confirmation when booking an appointment for their pets. 77% of U.S. customers expect to be able to book services online.
● Maximized revenue. With online booking, there is potential to tap into unrealized revenue since traditional methods are unable to capture appointments made outside of normal business hours. This is also when most customers have the time to book an appointment. Vetstoria’s customers see at least 40% of appointments made outside office hours. This creates revenue that was unearnable before.
● Maximized individual practice efficiency. With plenty of practices to manage, automation is the key to efficiency. Appointment reminders and confirmations take as much time as booking an appointment does; for some practices, it’s at least 15 minutes per appointment. An online scheduling platform can automate most of these tasks, including online payments, which helps teams stay productive and care for more pets.
How does Vetstoria address this burgeoning need for veterinary groups?
Integrates with more than 30 practice management software
Vetstoria integrates with more than 30 practice management software, so even if individual practices use heterogeneous PIMS, they can synchronize their availability with Vetstoria. Advanced customizations include syncing current availability, clinician scheduling, setting maximum appointments per appointment type, and excluding and offering slots to pet owners so they can make an appointment 24/7 from any device. Any other requirement, like confirming or reminding an appointment or triaging, can all be automated through Vetstoria's appointment scheduling software, making client communications simple for front desk teams.
Analytics and reporting
Decision-making is more manageable when it is data-driven. But gathering and interpreting all the required data into meaningful insights is also a time cost center. With Vetstoria’s advanced analytics and reporting, veterinary groups can see the performance of all the practices they manage through a custom-built dashboard. This dashboard shows them trends and insights, including the total number of existing and new customers, appointments made outside office hours, appointment sources, devices, and other pet owner-related insights. Vetstoria also provides benchmarking capabilities, so you can evaluate a single practice’s performance versus other practices that use Vetstoria in a specific region. Better yet, our team will walk you through these numbers and share recommendations to simplify decision-making.
Branding each veterinary practice
Each practice may have its branding, and your group will have elements in your brand identity you want to keep consistent. Vetstoria allows the booking platform to be customized visually, aligning with the colors you wish to display. This helps you maintain uniformity and consistency across the practices that use Vetstoria’s intuitive appointment scheduling software.
Hassle-free online payments
Adding online payments to transactions is a no-brainer because it offers convenience for both pet owners and individual practices. Integrated with Stripe, Vetstoria offers secure payments to pet owners, reducing no-shows with various payment options such as pre-authorized payments or full payment before arrival. Practice managers can conduct easy reconciliations with transaction history reports easily retrieved via the Vetstoria dashboard.
Easy measuring of promotion campaigns
How can you get better ROI with your marketing spend? First, it should be easy to track your efforts. Next, manage these campaigns efficiently to increase visibility for your practices. Your marketing team can easily create and manage promotional campaigns by using Vetstoria’s promotion campaign builder. These are “smart links” generated with the rules and settings that are added by practice teams for any time slots or days you want to drive revenue with integrated booking links. These links can then be placed in email campaigns, texts, and social channels, helping you run targeted promotions. They also combine well with our analytics component, so measuring the effectiveness of campaigns is easy.
Constant innovation
Our product team focuses on providing state-of-the-art technology to ensure the platform is intuitive to help practices be efficient. Feature updates are provided regularly, and your dedicated customer success teams will help you implement these features.
Value additions to your teams
While managing a minimum of 30 or more individual practices, you want to ensure every practice experiences the same level of success. So how else does Vetstoria support veterinary groups?
Dedicated onboarding
Vetstoria’s friendly onboarding and implementation team will be with you from day one to set up Vetstoria seamlessly in each practice, guiding you through the onboarding process and customizing the journey for every practice within your group.
Dedicated customer success team
Once onboarding is complete, our specialized customer success team will regularly conduct performance reviews to communicate your performance insights and make recommendations to improve each practice through our reporting and analytics capabilities. The team will assist in building custom dashboards to help you make sense of data for informed decision-making.
Improved pet owner experience
Gain insights from our team to provide customers with a great user experience through online booking, get bespoke marketing collateral to encourage revenue, and reduce phone call volume in each practice.
24/7/365 support
Get access to omnichannel support (live chats, calls, and emails) to have any of your questions answered, to get help adding new features, or for any assistance your teams may need when using Vetstoria for no additional cost.
Want to learn more? Join our webinar to discover more about how we can help your veterinary group make the most of veterinary technology, or book a demo here.
Welcome to The Rabbit Hole of Veterinary Analytics!
Table of Contents
What is analytics, anyway?
Why should you care?
Analytics offered by Vetstoria
- Pet owner behavioral data
- New client-specific data
- Appointment-specific data
- Complete dropout analysis
- Benchmarking data
Best-practice tips
Is number crunching not your jam?
It’s hard to think that anyone enjoys it, but knowing which numbers matter and what matters to your veterinary practice can put you ahead of others.
This is where data and analytics come in handy.
What is analytics, anyway?
Gartner, a leading technology research and consulting company, says that data and analytics manage data for all uses (operational and analytical). Data analysis helps to drive business processes and improve business outcomes through effective decision-making and enhanced customer experiences. CIO, the self-proclaimed “voice of IT leadership,” defines it as the “discipline focused on extracting insights from data.” Its critical goal is to apply analysis and tech to find trends and solve problems.
The same applies to your veterinary practice, too, because day in and day out, you deal with a lot of pet owners. You’d, therefore, want to understand the following:
● How they came to know of your practice.
● How you get appointments.
● How many animals you are treating a day.
● What campaigns or activities can you run to get more clients.
Why should you care?
Whether you’re part of a veterinary group or an individual practice, you want to understand how your veterinary practice(s) performs.
Analytics helps you boost your process and cost efficiency by 60%, drive strategy and change by 57%, and monitor financial performance by 52% (source). It’s undoubtedly the best way to influence the decision-making of your veterinary practice or group, driving more revenue and growth.
Additionally, it helps you do the following:
● Offer better and improved services to pet owners.
● Run focused and targeted campaigns.
● Gain more customers.
Analytics that Vetstoria can provide your veterinary practice
Vetstoria offers descriptive analytics that helps you understand what has happened and what’s happening right now, allowing you to identify trends and patterns. As soon as you log in to the Vetstoria dashboard, you will get a quick glimpse of such data as the total number of appointments and dropouts, origin of appointments, and even the type of device used to book the appointment. You can even get a deeper understanding of how your practice has been performing weekly or monthly to see recurring trends.
Vetstoria offers four types of analytics and data to gauge your performance, including:
● Pet owner behavioral data.
● New client or pet owner behavior data.
● Complete dropout analysis and data.
● Appointment-specific data.
Pet owner behavior
Dive deeper into pet owner behavior by looking at the device with which they booked an appointment — if it’s via a social channel, website, or through a campaign that you conducted — so you can optimize your promotions accordingly.
You can also discover when they made their appointments as well as the week with the highest rate of bookings. Most practices have noticed that 30-40% of the total appointments are made outside of office hours because pet owners make appointments whenever possible — online booking to the rescue!
New client-specific data
Businesses, in general, are always interested in getting new clients and understanding how they can amplify those efforts. The same applies to your practice. To that end, Vetstoria helps you by providing the following statistics:
● Number of new clients you get weekly or monthly
● New client dropouts.
● Number of new clients that book appointments outside of office hours.
● Devices used to book the appointment.
● Origins of new clients.
Appointment-specific data
● Total number of appointments by date
You will be able to understand the total and the new clients you got by date -— either on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis — to identify any patterns.
● Appointment booked times
These show the most popular times that appointments are booked. The gray areas are “after hours,” which are designated by the practice, and the white represents standard office hours. Hover over each point to understand exactly how many appointments are made at each end.
● Traffic conversions
Once you plug in Google Analytics to your website and Vetstoria, you can identify the conversions of your website traffic until it converts to a booked appointment.
● Most booked vet
You can hover over the graph to determine which vet has booked the most appointments. This may indicate that it would be better to change the office hours or offer different time slots with specific vets.
● Most booked species
Find out what type of animal gets the greatest number of appointments.
● Appointments versus type
This shows the number of appointments per type of appointment. It helps you understand which appointment types are most popular and which appointments pet owners associate with your practice. It also offers insight into whether you should push the least popular appointments via our digital marketing capabilities.
Complete dropout analysis
This means understanding how pet owners felt about the booking experience. Some insights include whether they found a suitable time slot or appointment type. Understanding the various reasons why a pet owner drops out during the booking process helps you improve the experience to drive a better completion rate. Find further information such as the total number of dropouts on a weekly basis, the device on which the appointment was booked, and the origin of the appointment.
● The total number of dropouts
● Appointment booked device
● Appointment origin
The origin of your revenue or appointments are data that any business would want to know to amplify promotions.
Benchmarking data
Want to learn how your practice fares compared to other Vetstoria users in your area? With benchmarking, you can get aggregated anonymized data of Vetstoria users so you can compare such statistics or percentages as:
● Total number of appointments.
● Total number of new clients.
● Total percentage of appointments booked outside of office hours.
● New clients booked outside of office hours.
These metrics are a great way to understand how your practice is doing and see where you need to improve.
Best-practice tips
It’s good practice to check up on your practice regularly. We recommend conducting weekly checks to monitor appointment counts, new clients, and dropouts so you can offer a better booking flow to pet owners. Then, every month, we suggest checking in with the Vetstoria customer success team to discover what each of these data points means and what you can do as a practice to improve.
What’s next?
Analytics can feel dull from the outset, but it’s equipped to be the most powerful tool at your disposal if you use it right. Applying the gathered insights helps identify trends and patterns about your practice, understand pet owners better, and earn more revenue. If you would like to learn more, visit our analytics page.
If you want to see how this data would look for your practice, feel free to book a one-on-one consultation with product specialists.
Are you an existing Vetstoria user? Schedule some time with our friendly customer success team to learn how you can optimize your performance.
Book a Demo
What’s new with Vetstoria's Appointment Scheduling Platform: Our Q3 update
Fall is here. For some, it’s the season of pumpkin spice lattes. For some, it’s the color of leaves changing.
For some, it’s this.
But for most of you, your workload is piling up (like the leaves), so here are some updates we’ve added to Vetstoria's appointment scheduling platform in the past 3 months to make your life better.
What’s new
● Seamless synchronization with IDEXX Cornerstone templates
Unmatched appointments due to differently named IDEXX Cornerstone templates and appointment types on Vetstoria? With this update, templates will easily sync with Vetstoria, displaying all the availability you mark on your Cornerstone. This will include the block-offs and matching appointment types with Vetstoria to offer pet owners maximum availability.
● New appointment scheduling option: Test my settings
In your dashboard under "schedule appointment", you can now test changes as soon as you make them. Once you click on this, you will be redirected to the same experience as “Schedule as a pet owner”. This will help the front desk staff to check a setting once they make a particular change quickly.
● Masking pet owner’s details in for increased security
When smart links are integrated for pet owners to book their vaccines (with integrations such as RxWorks and iRecall), their personal information is automatically populated. While this is convenient for the pet owner, the visible data could lead to their PII being vulnerable. So due to increased security, the pet owner’s information will be masked, making the booking process quicker for the pet owner.
● Booking confirmation clause
During the booking process, you may need to ensure that pet owners notice terms of service, privacy statements, or confirm their age or other vital details to get pet owner consent.
For such instances, we have now introduced the “booking information clause,” where you can add such statements via system messages on your dashboard. This will be visible during the “pet owner information” step of the booking process so completing the booking process would confirm their acknowledgment of such statements.
● Two-factor authentication for improved security
We made accessing your Vetstoria even safer. When you log in, you will receive a one-time unique authentication code to your email after entering your email address and password. This keeps your platform and pet information safe from 3rd parties trying to gain access to your system.
We added better features to our appointment scheduling platform
● The new client form now supports over seven languages.
Our new client form is dubbed a “game-changer” because it genuinely eliminates front desk staff time from contacting new pet owners to get additional information. We now provide the new client form in languages including German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Mandarin, and Czech so more practices can gain the advantage.
● Floating button positioning
Our floating button helps pet owners book appointments quickly. This helps to reduce the number of calls you get, and more practices have seen online appointments increasing by 13% a month. The new enhancement enables you to adjust the position of the floating button, allowing you to tweak its position around other important elements of your website.
● Relabelling of “scheduling with override” and “schedule with rules” for easy understanding
In case “schedule with override” and “Schedule with rules” were confusing, We relabelled these two essential functions on your dashboard, so it’s easier to grasp. Schedule as staff' (formerly schedule with override) allows staff members to schedule on behalf of the pet owner anywhere in their schedule, whereas 'schedule as a pet owner' (schedule with rules) means the staff member has to follow the same rules as a pet owner.
Therefore, we renamed it as
○ Schedule with override ➜ Schedule as staff
○ Schedule with rules ➜ Schedule as pet owners
If you need help setting up and or learning more about these features, our support team would be happy to help you. You can also book a demo with one of our team members.
