Forward Booking and Your Veterinary Practice: What You Need to Know

Appointment booking is what keeps every veterinary practice running, ensuring pets get the care they need while your revenue continues to grow. Even better, forward booking doubles down on veterinary care and profitability by scheduling a patient’s next visit before their pet parent leaves the clinic.

Forward booking is especially important for retaining new clients, quickly encouraging them to choose your business for veterinary care instead of going somewhere else. We’re discussing why forward booking matters for the pets you serve at your practice, how you can start setting it up, and the different forward booking tools you can use to keep pet health journeys—and your revenue—on track.

Why forward booking matters at your veterinary practice

Not every pet owner realizes the value in regularly maintaining their pet’s health to prevent pre-existing or unknown conditions from worsening. Forward booking helps pet parents stay on top of their pets’ health needs and ahead of preventable conditions by establishing more routine veterinary care that fits their pets’ health journeys. Here are three ways forward booking supports pets and their unique needs.

• Enhanced Pet Health Management: Life can get busy, making it easy for pet owners to forget to schedule regular veterinary care. When clients book another appointment before leaving the clinic, however, they’re more likely to follow through with their next visit and get their pets the care they need. Equipping pet owners with a veterinary-specific mobile app to manage their pets’ health can make this type of client commitment that much easier. Through a pet health mobile app, pet parents can access medical records, view vaccines, check lab results, receive reminders, and more to keep them in the know about their pets’ health journeys at all times. You can also let pet owners enroll in veterinary-specific loyalty programs that reward them with redeemable points for every visit, incentivizing them to become even more active in their pets’ veterinary care through discounts, promotions, and more.

• Improved Preventative Care: Annual checkups allow you to catch health issues early on, which makes forward booking that much more important. Forward booking veterinary appointments helps pet owners maintain a consistent preventative care routine, which reduces the likelihood of preventable conditions becoming serious problems. If a client wasn’t able to forward book their next appointment with you while in the clinic, you can send health service reminders directly to their mobile device to alert them when it’s time to schedule their pet’s next visit, and encourage them to book it.

• Better Follow-Up Compliance: Pets often require follow-up visits to manage ongoing health conditions. You can help pets get the care they need by securing their follow-up appointments before their owners leave your clinic. Not only that, but you can help ensure pet parents don’t forget about these appointments by sending automatic veterinary appointment reminders. These reminders can be delivered to a client’s email or mobile device well before they’re scheduled to come in, which helps to reduce no-shows and late cancellations. Plus, this information directly syncs with their digital calendars to help them prioritize their pets’ health more efficiently.

Adding forward booking to your veterinary clinic

According to the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA), simply increasing your forward booking rate from 5% to 10% can result in a 3% revenue growth. Although forward booking may not be realistic for every appointment, this shows that continuing to optimize your forward booking rate can provide some key profitability for your practice. To get started, make sure to first align your staff around your forward booking process.

• Create a Consistent Checkout Process: During checkout, train your team to ask each pet owner about scheduling another appointment by saying, “Would this same day of the week and time work for your next visit?” Since many people are used to this type of question in other settings (like salons or medical offices), they’ll be more likely to appreciate and agree to your proactive scheduling.
• Assign a Forward Booking Captain: It’s a good idea to designate one team member to lead the transition to forward booking at your practice, at least while your clinic gets used to the process. Once forward booking becomes more streamlined and well known for everyone, then the rest of your staff can join in and start forward booking appointments for pet owners as well.

PetDesk’s role in streamlining forward booking at your veterinary practice

There’s a lot of technology out there, but PetDesk’s veterinary client communication software optimizes every aspect of your operations with speed and accuracy. Here’s how we can help make your forward booking process become an instant success:

• Automated Appointment Reminders: PetDesk’s automated veterinary reminder system is the perfect compliment to your forward booking process. Pet parents will automatically receive appointment reminder alerts (which are sent by texts, emails, push notifications from the PetDesk’s veterinary mobile app, or mail) two days before their scheduled visits. Instead of missing out on opportunities for your clinic to provide quality pet care and secure revenue, our automatic reminders reduce missed appointments and last-minute cancellations by keeping veterinary care at the top of all pet parents’ minds.
• Simplified Scheduling: Sometimes pet owners need to think things over before committing to scheduling their next appointment while still in the clinic. Clients can easily request veterinary appointments through our PetDesk mobile app, allowing them to accurately book, confirm, and reschedule your services on their own. This helps to eliminate back-and-forth communication, ultimately saving everyone time while improving the client experience at your practice.
• Direct Calendar Sync: PetDesk directly works with digital calendars, making it super easy for clients to remember and prioritize veterinary care. Instead of navigating between multiple platforms to keep track of their pets’ appointments, they can seamlessly sync their information from the PetDesk App to their online calendars to conveniently keep up with their pets’ health journeys and always stay in the know.

Grow your veterinary clinic with forward booking and PetDesk!

Forward booking is a process every team member and pet parent can trust for veterinary care. With the right tools for your practice, pet owners can manage their pets’ health, improve preventative care, and follow through with the appointments their pets need. Plus, PetDesk App features like accurate appointment requesting, automatic reminders, and health service alerts make it easy to add and control forward booking for your clinic.

With a powerful forward booking process in place, you’ll be able to keep pet health journeys on track while retaining hard-earned revenue for your veterinary practice. While it’s not a fix-all solution, forward booking improves client satisfaction, reduces no-shows, and makes your environment more efficient for better patient care. Start using forward booking for your practice today, and watch your business begin to thrive in no time.