Here at LifeLearn, we recently announced a huge addition to our veterinary practice ECOsystem: A partnership with ALLYDVM, the animal health industry’s leading communication and reminder platform software.
ALLYDVM is the ideal partner for LifeLearn because its bundled software solution so easily and conveniently addresses some of the most common pain points you’re facing in your veterinary practice today. It’s a robust, multifunctional solution that addresses multiple symptoms within your practice operation, making it easy, affordable, and proven to increase both practice visits and bottom line revenue.
The ALLYDVM solution includes a client Communications System, Retention Calendar, a revolutionary client-facing Mobile App, plus the option to add on a Loyalty Program, all bundled together within our veterinary practice ECOsystem at one affordable monthly price.
Here’s how this powerful solution addresses so many practice pain points:
Pain point #1: Your clients are putting off regular visits (and prescription refills, and product purchases…)
Pet owners are notorious appointment procrastinators, but it isn’t usually because they just don’t want to come in to your practice. For the most part, it’s because they’re busy with the other parts of their life; they simply forget to book and attend regular veterinary appointments, refill prescriptions and restock their pet care products.
That’s why personalized reminders are a focus at most veterinary practices today, but there are some drawbacks. One-to-one calls and emails can be time-consuming, and there’s no guarantee your messages are reaching pet owners. These types of reminders are subject to a wide margin of human error as well—like mixing up dates, names, times and key information that pet owners rely on.
Every person has a different threshold for communications, but by constantly sending reminders, your administrative staff can feel like they’re pestering clients.
The solution: ALLYDVM’s innovative Communications System keeps track of reminder schedules, customizes them based on each pet owner’s observed tolerances and preferences, and sends them out without extra effort or stress on your team’s part.
The Communications System, which incorporates preset and customized emails, text messages, and postcards, is designed to enable veterinary practices of any size and specialty to customize and automate reminders—so you can grow your business with the client base you already have.
As a ‘best-in-breed’ solution, there’s also a great amount of flexibility for setting up filters, and other advanced settings that make it even more effective and scalable as your team works with it.
Pain point #2: You have no idea if your client reminders are being seen or heard
Just because you’re constantly leaving voicemails or sending out email reminders doesn’t mean that your clients are actually receiving them. When messages don’t make it to their recipients, it’s usually because the address or contact information on file is incorrect or has changed—which can mean that a pet owner doesn’t get an important reminder.
From a clients’ perspective, this can affect whether they believe your practice is credible—even if the issue is that they gave you the wrong email address. It’s up to your veterinary practice to ensure the integrity of your clients’ contact information right from the start of the relationship. This understanding is critical because you’ve likely already experienced how missed or improperly relayed information can negatively impact your practice—and even cost you your clients’ loyalty.
Confirming the contact information you have on file is much easier said than done, and can lead to more pain: the amount of time it takes staff members to keep information updated.
Let’s say a pet owner checks into your practice for a scheduled appointment. The administrative staff spends a couple of minutes going through your practice management software to make sure that all the contact information and details for that pet owner are up to date, and that there aren’t other pets missing reminders and appointments.
That time adds up to an hour or two each day of squandered opportunity, which that person could have instead been spending on proactive tasks that generate revenue or strengthen relationships with those pet owners.
The solution: The Retention Calendar is designed not just to help you retain clients by keeping your clients’ contact information up to date, but also to save your staff time while doing it.
“We realized that no matter how smart or sophisticated our Communications System might be, if there’s not a validated email address or phone number in that underlying practice management system, we can’t send a message to that pet owner,” explained Scott Harper, CEO of ALLYDVM. “That was the genesis of our Retention Calendar.”
Designed so that the entire system syncs hourly with most established practice management systems, ALLYDVM’s powerful solution pulls data such as client contact information, reminders, and any ‘associated’ household pets directly from the practice’s own management system, and organizes it to flag problem data.
This way, your administrative staff sees and accesses all of the contact information issues in one place in seconds, rather than double-checking information for each and every client in multiple places within your system. You can rely on the fact that once it’s been updated in your practice management system, it will be accurately synced across the entire ALLYDVM platform.
With the Retention Calendar’s ability to flag when there are problems with any contact data, you will finally be able to trust that clients are reliably receiving all of your communications and reminders.
Pain point #3: You’re not filling your appointment schedule
There’s only one thing worse than pet owners not showing up for appointments, and that’s not having any pet owners scheduled in the first place. As much as you want to schedule appointments so you can help pets and your practice, sometimes, you end up with gaps in your team’s calendars—or worse, your team’s calendars are full, but they’re not quality appointments and you know that’s hurting your bottom line.
You also know intuitively that customer retention efforts are easier than acquisition initiatives as a way to fill these gaps, but let’s put a number on them. From a purely economic standpoint, customer retention costs about five times less than customer acquisition. Yes, every practice still needs to bring in new clients as its client base naturally declines, but keeping and maximizing results from your existing client base saves time and money.
The solution: ALLYDVM’s Retention Calendar operates on the premise that if your clients’ data is up to date, and you can reach them effectively using reminders, you stand a much better chance of booking additional and valuable quality appointments from within your existing client base.
When you use the Retention Calendar, you’re simply engaging with pet owners who already have a trusted relationship with your practice and team. In fact, you’re giving them more reasons to trust and rely on your practice by helping them to schedule their appointments more efficiently.
According to Harper, the average animal hospital in the U.S. has 1,091 active patients who are missing reminders. That same hospital will have 19 chances per day to schedule an appointment for a pet who needs one but doesn’t have one.
“These patients are already in the system, and for some reason, they’re not consuming veterinary services as they should,” said Harper. “As consultants we found that, on average, nearly 60% of an animal hospital’s patients are past due for at least one item.”
This is a huge issue for practices to tackle manually. The Retention Calendar helps by automatically focusing on the easiest appointments to book—such as clients who have an appointment for one pet, but not another.
According to Harper, many practices using ALLYDVM’s Retention Calendar are adding an average of three or four quality appointments each day.
“Volume is key, so if you can add even just one more quality $150 appointment per day you’ll see the financial benefit much more quickly than if you raise your prices on this product or that service by $1.25,” said Harper.
Pain point #4: You suspect your clients aren’t loyal to your practice
Every marketing activity requires the right tools, and retaining clients is no different. Practices need better ways to communicate with clients, build their trust, and keep them loyal.
There are a number of reasons why clients will change practices, but a little motivation to stay loyal can go a long way. A loyalty program can be a great motivator, and can really help show your clients how much you value their patronage.
So why is it then that so many practices don’t have one? Maybe you’ve tried a loyalty program and it wasn’t customizable. Maybe it took too much time to set up and maintain manually, or the staff member who set it up is no longer with your team. Maybe implementing a program just seemed too daunting an initiative.
The solution: Loyalty programs that actually make life easier for veterinary practices are a rare breed, but they do exist.
“We were able to build the industry’s first automated loyalty program based on the feedback that our customers were giving us about all of the loyalty solutions they had been using,” explained Harper. “ALLYDVM’s Loyalty Program was a customer-driven innovation.”
This Loyalty Program is integrated within the ALLYDVM Mobile App available as part of the Power Practice Bundle. It uses the same information as the Retention Calendar to keep track of how much pet owners are spending, and when they’ve reach the milestones you’ve established. Just pick your settings for spending amounts and rewards, and off you go!
Excited to learn more about our powerful ALLYDVM solution? Need more information? Visit our website, book a demo, or call one of our Practice Specialists so we can show you how advantageous the entire ALLYDVM system really is for your practice!
