How can Your Veterinary Consolidator Maximize Revenue with Vetstoria?

A key performance indicator (KPI) for most of the practices in your group would be to grow exponentially — book more appointments. Once a single practice succeeds, you would want to replicate that across your group while ensuring all resources are shared efficiently. Your veterinary group can do this easily by adopting an online appointment and automation platform such as Vetstoria. This is a great way to maximize revenue.

Along with efficiency from reducing call volume, growth and revenue maximization are key benefits that Vetstoria offers veterinary practices.

How does Vetstoria offer growth for veterinary practices?

Improved pet owner experience with online booking

Real-time online booking is one of the key ways practices can grow. From a pet owner’s perspective, it’s easy to use and wastes no time. Phone lines ringing off the hook might seem an indication of a thriving practice, but it’s also unmanageable. This is why more than 3,000 practices have adopted Vetstoria: It gives their teams the freedom to work on other tasks, providing a better pet owner experience. Because of online booking, for example, DNA Vetcare Group enjoys a 93% satisfaction rate from pet owners because online booking is the new standard in most industries.

Customers who use Vetstoria see that a large percentage of pet owners book appointments outside of office hours. This is because pet owners like to book when it’s convenient for them, and online booking offers 24-hour availability for them to do that. This is exemplified by Lakefield Veterinary Group, which documents that at least 40% of appointments are booked outside of office hours. That’s almost half of their revenue — revenue that they wouldn’t receive if pet owners had to book by phone.

Vetstoria offers a bespoke journey for each practice in your veterinary group. Each practice can customize their experience by adding rules that offer online booking when it’s convenient for them.

AniCura, which manages 350 practices, likes online booking because it not only helps to manage the telephone lines, but it allows the practice to accept many more appointments.

“You have to be up and running when it comes to digital solutions. Vetstoria makes the workflow efficient, that’s really important. We aim to get more clinics to use online booking, for example, in Denmark, we have 8 users today but we hope to increase it to 23 by the end of the year.”

Michaela Wickman – Group Digital Project Manager, Customer Experience, AniCura

More reach with digital marketing and social channel embedding 

Your veterinary group has a lot of digital channels to manage. This could vary from social channels to digital platforms like Google Analytics, Hubspot, and other content management platforms.

Vetstoria plays well with various digital channels. One of the ways you would see growth is by increasing your visibility in each of these channels. Practices can also offer various campaigns, so yours would be top of mind when pet owners look for practices. With our digital marketing feature, you can create campaign “smart links” that can be placed in emails, text or paid channels that are easy to track via our analytics feature. 

With the multiple social channels that you manage, Vetstoria provides the capability to add the direct booking link to your social channels. So when pet owners discover one of your practices through Google My Business, for example, that link would take them directly to the booking widget, accelerating the appointment scheduling process and improving the pet owner experience. This results in more bookings and, therefore, more revenue for your veterinary practices.

Maximize revenue with telemedicine

Looking for new ways to earn revenue? Sometimes pet owners are most likely to directly call or send a quick text to vets they build relationships with.

And with lockdown and safety concerns regarding COVID-19, your practices can be more flexible by offering remote consultations for quick checkups or questions.

With telemedicine, not only do you provide a new way for pet owners to book appointments, but you now offer a new revenue method or a way to monetize those “quick calls” pet owners make. 

Wylie Veterinary Centre, for example, saw an additional £14,000 in revenue within just two weeks of adopting telemedicine.

Telemedicine also offers the flexibility to help practices manage their team efficiency and offer flexible hours and rotation at the same time — and it’s the perfect way to triage appointments as well as address timid pets. Telemedicine appointments can be offered as an appointment type via the Vetstoria booking platform so pet owners can easily choose the appointment, pay and access the consultation link on any device. 

“What’s important to our clients is that they are given the option to choose. We’ll call and offer this new feature to save them the trip. Most people would take it up on the offer and do a video consultation instead.”

– Gail Bigelow, Hospital Manager, Center Veterinary Clinic

Analytics 

Analytics help increase your practices’ efficiency and optimize your operations. With Vetstoria you can identify a range of data from how each practice performed including their total number of appointments, new clients, the origin of appointments and dropouts. A key data point is the number of appointments made outside of office hours which helps practices realize the clear benefit of offering 24/7 real-time online booking. 

All the data points are presented in a corporate dashboard that can be easily extracted and analyzed to make fast decisions. Our customer success team will schedule regular performance reviews where they share insights and make recommendations based on these data. Additionally, the team will also provide benchmarking data; an anonymized aggregation of all the data of your practices so you can see how they are performing in comparison to others. 

“Before Vetstoria, we were trying to manually figure out client conversion data but now we can just log into the dashboard and see how a campaign performed by looking at how many appointments were booked, if people are dropping off and how we can optimize future campaigns.”

– Emily Arnold, Senior Director – Marketing, Lakefield Veterinary Group

Online payments

Some veterinary practices feel that using online payments or charging a deposit from pet owners would discourage them from booking online. But paying online is now the rule, not an exception. As we discovered in one of our latest webinars on how payments reduce no-shows, director and operations managers at Stokewood Veterinary Center said that sometimes new pet owners like to “shop around” looking for rates, so charging a deposit would reduce no-shows. In their case, they went from 59 no-shows per week to zero after adding online payments.

Vetstoria offers two popular methods to offer payments: full payment upfront or pre-authorized deposits. This helps provide pet owners with a seamless experience when booking appointments.

Additionally, online payments help collect revenue for appointments right away and reduce the need to follow up on bad debts. It makes payment reconciliation easier, helping front desk staff save even more time.

What’s next?

Veterinary groups and consolidators have a gargantuan task of offering centralized operation support, marketing, finance, mentorship, leadership, and technology to the practices within the group. Vetstoria is a major component in the “technology stack” as it offers a real-time booking platform along with other features, including digital marketing, payments, analytics, and telemedicine. These not only save time and increase efficiency but help your veterinary group achieve more revenue and growth in the long term.

If you want to learn more about the features that Vetstoria offers, join our webinar to learn from other veterinary groups that use Vetstoria.