When the sun is shining and the pups’ tails are wagging, it’s easy to feel like things are sailing smoothly in your veterinary practice.
But it’s no time to get complacent. Continually improving your clinic’s efficiency is critical for staying competitive. Not only will increasing efficiency help your business grow, it’ll help you streamline your processes.
How-to Guide: 4 Ways to Run an Efficient Small Business
DownloadAnd doing that will get you and your staff back to doing what you love most. So follow these tips for improving your veterinary clinic’s efficiency today.
Take Care of Your Talent
Optimizing your team is perhaps the number one thing you can do to help improve your efficiency.
The point is to ensure your staff’s talent isn’t going to waste. They have skills and training you’ve hired them for. Making them do menial labor or work outside their scope can increase friction in your business.
There are multiple ways you can look for where work is wasted, but taking away basic or mindless tasks is the first place to start.
This is where you can use automation. Busy paperwork isn’t a problem for software, and the best software systems know this.
Here are a few things automation can help your clinic streamline:
- Social Media: You won’t need to have a dedicated social media person.
- Emails and reminders: No more hours on the phone.
- Reviews: You can eliminate the awkward ask for reviews.
- Scheduling and booking: Customers can book appointments themselves online.
Even if you have a dedicated staff member for administrative work, helping them do their job better and more effectively means they’re freed up to be more strategic. For instance, they can assist customers or research ways to innovate the practice.
And of course, if they can do their job more easily, they’ll be more grateful to you for it.
Keep Track of Documents
If you’re still keeping hardcopy records and files on your client’s pets, your practice’s efficiency will be low.
It takes time to find, organize and update paper files manually, especially when pet ownership is at an all-time high.
So switching to digital — or better yet, cloud-based systems — will help your vet clinic become more efficient.
Digitization (with an assist from automation) can also help you personalize your client communications. You don’t have to remember every pooch or kitty’s vaccination schedule when a file on a server can send reminder text messages to your clients.
Not only will your pet owners feel appreciated, their pets will have healthier lives since wellness appointments won’t be forgotten.
Get Paid Faster
Part of running a more efficient vet clinic is about getting cash flow right — and that means ensuring payments are made on time.
Chasing payments can be a time-exhausting and soul-breaking task. There are several ways you can make this process easier, or even eliminate it altogether.
- Offer multiple payment options. If you still only take cash or check payments, then you’re forcing customers to pay on your terms, not theirs. Make this process as frictionless as possible by providing as many payment options as possible.
- Setup automated reminders. This will chase the payments for you, and can even remind customers of upcoming payments, payment plans or invoices.
- Take payments upfront. You can take payments on some of your services — like check-ups, vaccinations and teeth cleaning, for example — through an online booking system instead of at the appointment.
Solving these problems will help your veterinary practice become more efficient for the future. And it will make everything else in your business run more smoothly.
It’s well worth the effort — and our team will help you every step of the way.
The Guide to Running an Efficient Small Business
We’re sharing our expert tips to help you boost productivity, eliminate time-wasting tasks, and more in this free guide.
