Managing new clients efficiently with Vetstoria

Modified on Sat, 17 Sep 2022 at 12:38 PM

Any new pet owner you accommodate now is a loyal customer in the future. And it’s heartbreaking to say no to puppies and other fur babies because they deserve care too. And, of course, continuing to decline new customers will hurt your practice in the long run.

So how can you use Vetstoria to manage new clients better?

Specifying which appointments will cater to new clients

With Vetstoria’s appointment types, you can specify which appointments you want to offer to new clients. You can also specify the duration of the appointment leaving the schedule to be more flexible.

So when new clients book appointments, those will appear in the dropdown menu.

Go to settings
Click on appointment types
Choose availability from the “Show options for” drop-down
Choose the appointment type you want to offer to new clients (for example, consultations)
Choose “new clients” under the appointment type
Click save

You can further customize it by adding the type of species you want to treat, the vet or doctor if they would like to have a choice, and even the appointment duration.

Set a limit per appointment type

We recommend setting a quota or a limitation for the appointment types you offer a day to new clients. We introduced “maximum appointments”, so if you want to provide only 4 consultations for new clients a day, you can add 4 in the dropdown so the booking platform will display just 4 slots to new clients. You can enable this per appointment per day, and it helps you maintain control of your schedule while being flexible.

Go to settings
Click appointment types
Choose availability from the “Show options for” drop-down
Choose the appointment type you want to offer to new clients (for example, consultations)
Choose “new clients” under the appointment type
Choose the number of appointments you want to offer a day under “max appointments”
Click save

Have enough time between appointments

Our recommendation is to push the appointment back by 24-48 hours for new clients to give the team enough time to register the pets in their schedule or calendar. With “Gap to the earliest slot” under availability in appointment types, you can ensure that new clients leave enough time to arrive at the practice.

Go to settings
Click on appointment types
Choose availability from the “Show options for” drop-down
Choose the appointment type you want to offer to new clients (for example, consultations)
Choose “new clients” under the appointment type
Set the number of hours you want under “gap to the earliest slot”
Click save

Get a deposit from new clients

We’ve found that the majority of practices see no-shows from new clients. And enabling payments from these clients reduces no-shows too. You can learn more about it over here.

If you’re yet to use our payments feature, ask your customer success rep or support to team enable it for you. Once you do,

Go to settings
Click on appointment types
Choose payments from the “Show options for” drop-down on the top right
Choose the appointment type you’ve enabled for new clients
Choose the payment option. For an example, you can go with full payment or pre-authorized

Set the amount you wish to receive from the new client
Click save changes

Triaging new clients through telemedicine

While telemedicine took off in 2020 with COVID19, it’s still a great tool to provide consultation for a quick diagnosis or even to offer a nurse checkup before scheduling a consultation with a doctor.

You can also offer telemedicine appointments to new clients so no pet goes uncared for. If you haven’t enabled telemedicine, you can ask our support team to enable it for you. Once they do, you can,

Go to settings
Click appointment types
Choose “telemedicine” from the drop-down
Toggle on telemedicine for appointment types you want to offer to new clients as a video consultation
Click save

Alternatively, you can also create video consultations as an appointment. You can learn more about it over here.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

We always recommend managing pet owner expectations at the beginning of your interaction - it makes a better experience for them and the team.

For example, you can use the content pages to add your disclaimers explicitly informing new clients of any limitations, the types of appointments you can accommodate, and redirect them to other alternatives like video consultations. This way, you can reduce customer frustrations and dropouts as they know what the practice can offer them.

Learn more about creating content pages over here.

Automate your new client form and get all the info you need during the booking process

Adding the new client form to your booking flow saves your team a lot of time as they get emailed once the pet owner fills in their details.

Go to settings
Enable the new client form so it appears at the end of the booking process. Our new client form is also provided in over 8 languages making it easy to adopt it.
You can decide which information you need by enabling each field on advanced settings

If you want to have your own new client form, you can simply redirect the last page to it or send it with our fully customizable confirmation emails at the end of the appointment. You can ask our friendly support team to help you.

Ask for previous vet details or add a custom question

In addition to the new client form, you can also enable “ask for previous vet details” as well add an additional question you want to ask new clients. Both of these customizations help you understand more about the new client booking an appointment with your practice.

To ask for previous vet details, ask our support team to enable this for you and it will appear on the booking form for pet owners to enter the details.

To add a custom question:

Click on settings
Enable the “custom question field”
Enter the question you want to ask the pet owner
Click save

Vetstoria users who use a combination of these features have managed new clients booking appointments with their practices effectively. If you need any help to set these up, get in touch with our friendly customer success team.

If you have any questions or if you need further help, please login to Vetstoria to chat with our team or use the Contact Support form linked at the top of this page.