Admission and Discharge: Improving your Client Journey Pt 4

When was the last time you stopped to consider how to improve your client journey?

Your client’s experience with your veterinary practice starts from the moment they begin researching local vets and continues long after they leave your practice after their first visit.

Along this journey there are multiple touchpoints outside of an actual consultation which many veterinary practices fail to make the most of, this is a real missed opportunity!

The importance of getting the customer experience right cannot be underestimated, the likelihood is that word of mouth powers a huge part of your business, what your clients think of their experience of your practice can quite literally have new clients queueing up at the doors or avoiding you like the plague.

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Our Veterinary IT Experts have years of experience helping practices to make the most of their client journey, using the simplest tech that they already have access to (because no one wants to spend additional time and money on additional software).

In doing so we’ve identified four stages that’s are commonly neglected which could be improved with Microsoft 365:

1. Choosing a Vet
2. Preventative Health Questionnaires
3. Arriving and Waiting
4. Admission into Hospital and Discharge

In this article we’ll be focusing on the fourth experience your client will have of your practice, Admission and Discharge. Admitting your pet into hospital can be a very difficult experience for an owner, especially if they are being admitted for emergency care or treatment. Its important that the experience is kept as simple and stress free as possible, the likelihood is that your client won’t remember a lot of the information that you give them, so they will need to be able to take it away with them to read at home.

This blog will focus on Microsoft Sway, Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Teams, just three of the Apps within the 365 Suite available to Office 365 Education customers, Microsoft 365 Apps for business customers, and users with a Microsoft account (Hotmail, Live, or Outlook.com). So, if you have any of these subscriptions you already have access to these App.

The App: Microsoft Sway

• Sway enables your team to quickly and easily produce professional, interactive, and visually appealing branded designs. Why not use them to create information booklets on your most common procedures and post-operative care. Use them to set your client’s expectations for outcomes, timings to go home, post-operative care and likely recovery. All explained and agreed ahead of time.
• You could even go one step further and easily embed video and audio explaining basic post-procedure care. This would be particularly useful for an owner who is nervous about how to administer pain relief, change a dressing or conduct light physio if required.
• As you can see who has accessed these documents in real time you will be able to identify those clients who are engaging with their pet’s recovery process.

The App: Microsoft Forms

• If you want to ensure that your clients have read and understood the patient care documents you’ve given them, why not send them a form (created and customisable in Microsoft Forms) to fill in confirming they understand. As stated previously, these electronic forms can be completed anywhere on any device, in the practice on a tablet (perhaps whilst waiting for the vet to be ready) or at home or in the car park on a phone or on a computer.
• Forms is fully customisable and is capable of capturing a variety of information and asking different types of questions. This means that you can even put in a section where your clients can ask for more information on certain areas they are struggling with, for example, ask for a demonstration or video of how to administer pain relief etc.
• As Forms offers analysis, you could even see trends of where you can improve your patient care documents (if your clients are consistently requesting the same additional information, you can just include this in the main document)

Pro tip: Use Power Automate to automatically trigger an email with a video or extra information if the client requests if in the Form. This way, your client gets the information they need whilst your team can get on with other tasks.

The App: Microsoft Teams

• Teams is a powerful hub chat, meetings, calls and collaboration. This is particularly useful not only for rapid communication between your practice departments but also across multi-site practices. It can be used along side your telemedicine platform (if you have one) or instead of one.
• Many practices offer update calls to clients whilst their pet is admitted, discharge appointments when they are ready to go home and follow up calls or telemedicine for post-operative checks. Teams can be used to do these via a video chat, simply send the link to your client either via text or email and all they have to do is click on it, no matter where they are located.
• Some fantastic extra features included are scheduling assistance, note taking, screen sharing, recording, and instant messaging. This could be a powerful communication tool to use with your team and any concerned pet owners.

Pro tip: Why not share those post-operative care documents with the client via Teams whilst on the video call? Highlight specific areas of significance and answer any questions they have right there and then!

The experience that your customer has with your practice can always be improved upon. And this is absolutely something that technology can help with, but before rushing into signing up to new platforms it’s worth taking the time to check to see what the systems you already have can do for you. We love to see veterinary practices really make the most of the technology that they have at hand.

This is where we come in, as Veterinary IT experts we are best placed to ensure that you are getting the most of the technology you have, and can advise you on how to use tech to help elevate your practice.

We hope that you have found this blog useful, and we look forward to seeing all the innovative ways that you use your Microsoft 365 Apps within your practice, so please do get in touch, especially if you have any ideas that we haven’t thought of!

If you would like to talk to an IT expert on how your practice can get the most from Microsoft 365, just get in touch.