When it comes to taking payments for animal health services at a veterinary practice, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the process has remained unchanged for a long time: Fido’s pet parents entered the clinic, Fido was examined, and the pet parent checked out and paid by cash, credit card, or check at the front desk. This article: enhancing Veterinary Services with Innovative Payment Methods
However, as the veterinary profession evolves, embracing new innovations from concierge/curbside services to total operational restructuring, enhancing efficiency and client service. One aspect proven essential to practice operations but seldom reviewed or considered is credit card processing.
Online options, portable equipment, and the ability to conduct business with minimal contact has become increasingly important. Offering practices more efficient ways to operate and accept payments can help streamline veterinary services. Here are three simple and effective changes veterinary practices can adopt to enhance their service:
1. Add Online Payments to your Practice Website
Today websites are more than simple marketing tools with a clinic description, images, and contact details. Instead they are used as a powerful tool for booking appointments, taking payments (like our handy integrated or standalone ecommerce solutions), and ordering through online pharmacies.
Benefits of collecting payments online:
Adopting a remote way to accept payments allows practice managers the ability to quickly bill and collect payments from pet parents with minimal hassle – all without requiring them to be physically at the front desk or in the exam room.
Regardless of whether your practice leverages integrated payments with its PIMS system, you will still see the advantages of using online payments either on your website or via a payment page. Accepting payments securely online can minimize human error, streamline recurring billing, improve dashboard management, and can provide more client tools to enhance operational efficiency and payment management. More importantly, the payments accepted online are securely encrypted and tokenized to ensure the customer and your data is protected.
Additionally, your practice can utilize an appointment deposit policy. When a pet is in need of an appointment urgently, you see the trend of pet parents scheduling appointments across multiple practices in order to be seen quickly. As urgency increases, you’ll often see a trend of pet parents forgetting to cancel the other appointments they do not use. When your veterinary practice adopts a non-refundable deposit policy, you can mitigate losses in time and money that no-shows can often cause.
Also, many veterinary practices utilize online waitlists for when a caretaker cancels at the last minute. Software solutions, like, Next In Line, not only provides real-time online booking to help save staff time, reduce the amount of manual data entry, but also allows pet parents to have the option to actively wait for an open and available appointment time on days you may be fully booked. Pet parents and caretakers are then able to get notified and reminded via text or email of an appointment, which can all be recorded back into a PIM (if applicable).
Benefits don’t stop at in-clinic appointments, Equine and Mobile Veterinarians reduce missed appointments, bounced checks, and failed credit card payments with having a way for animal owners to pay remotely or online. Mobile vets now have the ability to take deposits before appointments, and securely store customer credit card data in order to take payments for services no matter where they are working.
Enhancing Veterinary Services with Innovative Payment Methods is essential!
Utilizing Gravity Link on Your Veterinary Website
Gravity Link is a payment gateway allowing you to accept payments online. Using the Gravity Link tool, you can input and save customer information, set up recurring billing, and even manage invoices and receipts for easy documentation. Plus, you can integrate it directly with your website.
NB: Here’s a useful article about preparing your site for e-commerce!
2. Implement Text-to-Pay
Not unlike online payments, Text to Pay is a great way to bill customers wherever they are. Automatically generating invoices and payment links and sending them via SMS has obvious time savings benefits. It is also a great way to operate a curbside or mobile service without the cost of wireless hardware.
Saving time with Text to Pay
Many popular veterinary PIMS integrate with Gravity’s SMS Text to Pay feature. This integration enables you to trigger a text, billing your customer directly from inside the management software. Animal caretakers or parents can easily access and pay the bill from their smartphone.
Decrease lost revenue and late payments
Text communications have a 98% open rate on average, compared with a 30%-40% open rate with emails, getting in front of your customers. Text-to-pay can keep your customers on-time and up-to-date with their payments, and it keeps your cash flowing.
3. Using Mobile Point-of-Sale Devices
There is a new normal for the veterinary industry. POS devices like the Clover Flex can integrate into any situation. Whether you need your device integrated to your PIM or want to run payments in a standalone environment. The Clover Flex has the adaptability you need to efficiently run your practice.
Another device making the mobile environment financially safer for veterinarians is Swipe Simple, a small bluetooth card reader that fits neatly in a pocket, allowing you to swipe, tap, or dip credit cards wherever you are.
Benefits of a Mobile POS Device:
Time savings:
Clover Flex has become an extremely popular device by reducing the trips to clients’ vehicles, curbside from as many as three to one.
Mindful Payment Collection:
Taking payments in an emotionally challenging situation can be tough. As an example: A terminally ill animal is brought into your practice to be euthanized. Taking payment for this crucial service is much harder. In some cases, delaying collecting for this service for days or weeks after the event increases the likelihood of lost revenue. With a mobile point-of-sale, like the Clover Flex wireless terminal, you are able to process payment in the privacy of the exam room or a client’s car, wherever the caretaker or parent is most comfortable.
Maneuvering in today’s ever-changing technology environment can be a lot to stay on top of. By making some of these small changes with your payment technology, your practice will have a more adaptable and secure way to collect payments in any situation. Gravity Payments is ready to help find the right solutions in affordable standalone or integrated solutions with many popular PIMS. If you’re interested in seeing these products in action or learn more about how you can improve the productivity of your veterinary practice, let’s chat! Our Veterinary Payment Specialists will always consult with you to make sure your solution works best for your individual practice. Enhancing Veterinary Services with Innovative Payment Methods is essential!
