If you run a veterinary practice, it’s important to uphold your reputation to gain new clients and keep them coming back. To successfully provide exceptional patient care and client accommodations, it’s necessary to have state-of-the-art equipment and software.
Pet owners take this into consideration when researching veterinary practices and clinics. How? Take your practice’s website. When a pet owner is looking for a vet, he’ll likely go to your website to gauge your suitability. If your website looks old and outdated, odds are he will assume the same about your practice.
Bottom line: Old-school technology won’t cut it these days, and more and more veterinary practices and hospitals are catching on, yet so many are still using payment technology that is 10+ years old. Below we cover three reasons to upgrade your veterinary payment technology.
- Front-Office Crowds
Investing in your diagnostic technology means spending less time identifying patient issues. Sally-Anne Whybrow of Veterinary Practice agrees: "State-of-the-art point of care ultrasound systems, MRI and CT scanners offer immediate benefits, allowing for faster, more accurate and non-invasive diagnoses as well as offering better identification and management of pet diseases previously difficult to diagnose and treat.”
So, you can cut down appointment times and see more patients in a given day, right?
Not necessarily. Unless your front-office technology matches what you have in the exam rooms, you’re still bound to have a bottleneck when it comes to checkout. Eventually, this discrepancy will cause front-office crowding, with customers trying to pay and leave while others are arriving to check in with patients.
- Inconsistent Patient Records
In a modern veterinary clinic or hospital, you’re likely using a patient management system (PMS), such as ezyVet. Using an antiquated payment terminal alongside it means you’re working in a vacuum when it comes to running transactions.
Now imagine a day stacked with back-to-back appointments. With disparate systems, this requires manual, double entry and lining up transactions to services at the end of the day. Now, in addition to the bottleneck in the front office, your staff faces inconsistent records and, quite frankly, a mess of paperwork before leaving for the day.
- Stressed Customers
Scared and stressed customers aren’t unfamiliar to you and your staff. In fact, your team does all they can to put these delicate customers at ease. While they are well versed in handling almost every possible scenario, it’s likely that discussing the bill may be hardest.
We all know veterinary fees can stack up quickly and be a heavy burden on customers. They want the best treatment for their pets, but that comes at a cost. With outdated payment technology, you’re not making it any easier for your customers to meet these bills in a timely and convenient manner.
Invest in Your Veterinary Payment Technology
Give your customers the front-office experience you’re already providing to your patients in the exam room. Upgrading your payment technology to include features like paperless payment processing, storing cards on file and recurring payment schedules will help your practice avoid the three issues described above.
Going paperless means a quicker check out for you and your customers. No fiddling with printed receipts or filing cabinets. Existing customers can be charged with one-click, which automatically logs the payment history in their account. With an integrated PMS, this will be synced to the patient record. If you aren’t using a PMS, you can still benefit from automatically logged payment records that you can search for as you would with Google. Lastly, leveraging recurring payment schedules allows you to break up large bills into smaller amounts and bill to the customer automatically on a schedule you agree on.
Upgrade your veterinary payment technology today.
Why haven’t you upgraded your practice’s payment technology yet? Tell us below, we’d love to talk through ways to make this happen and improve your veterinary practice even more!
