Historically, many veterinary practice partners have been wary of Two-Way messaging: they wanted to provide convenience and accessibility to their clients, but were concerned about some clients taking up more time and expecting replies at all hours.
Recently, for our partner practices, that fear has been replaced with enthusiasm. When we started building this for our customers, we took seriously the needs of a small animal veterinary practice and put a lot of customizability and control in for practices to use.
Introducing Two-Way Messaging
Two-Way Messaging is now available as an add on product to new and existing PetDesk users.
With picture messages and complete client message histories, veterinary practices and their clients are able to connect in a personal way over the most engaging channel of communication: text messages.
Uses for Two-Way Messaging at test clinics have ranged, but the most frequent uses have been:
- Notify clients when their medication refill is ready
- Let clients know when their routine lab results come back negative
- Send them updates and pictures about their pet from the clinic
- Acknowledge and reschedule appointment cancellations
Key Benefits
Think of all the phone calls your front desk has to make in between answering inbound calls. How much time would you save if communicating that same information was a text message, and not a voicemail?
Additionally, clients want it. A consumer preference study found that 78% of people who text wish that they could text businesses. With clients asking for it, and front desks struggling with call volume, Two-Way Messaging is valuable to your clients and your business simultaneously.
Key Functionality
Auto-Response for Close Hours
A concern we heard from clinics was troubling: what if a client texted the clinic while it was closed with an emergency? Or what if a client was upset the clinic didn’t get back to them quickly after they sent a text at 10:00pm at night?
To address this, we enable clinics to choose their close hours, and automatically respond to clients that text their line during those hours. Templates
Many clinics use scripts to make routine conversations more efficient. We wanted to enable your front desk in just the same way. Now, you can write templates to be used in specific situations. Telling a client about a negative fecal? Write it up once and just select it as a template every time after. Use Your Current Phone Number
At least some clients save your number in their phone. It would make sense if they could just text that number, right? So we made sure in building this that our clients would have the option to select their current phone number to receive text messages.
Overall Goal
We want to empower our customers to keep their clinic efficient while providing personal touch in new and innovative ways. PetDesk’s Two-Way Messaging was built to satisfy this goal, and we’re overjoyed with the early approval from our customers. If you’re interested in adding Two-Way Messaging to your subscription, or want to talk about adding PetDesk to your practice, use the form below to speak with one of our Practice Management Consultants.
Learn More About Two-Way Messaging
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