Does this sound familiar? Every month, you spend your hard-earned money on marketing that is supposed to bring you a steady stream of new clients and business. Postcards, social media, pay-per-click advertising, SEO, hell, you even hired a marketing agency. The future of your practice depends on these methods capturing the attention of potential pet owners.

And yet - what percentage of your social media followers have scheduled an appointment with your office? People who have found you organically on Google? How about those who’ve received a postcard in the mail with your office number on it? You know, those fancy postcards that you spent a lot of money on.

What if I told you that the lack of appointments coming from your marketing efforts has way less to do with the quality of your marketing and way more with the utter lack of convenience when it comes to actually scheduling an appointment?

Simply put, your marketing is not the problem, the convenience bottleneck that you created is.

Picture this:

Sandra arrives home from work at 5:37 p.m. on Wednesday and before she walks inside, she checks her mailbox. 

She sorts through, sees your postcard welcoming her to the neighborhood, and inviting her to call your office for an annual checkup for her pet.

“Great”, thinks Sandra, “I’ve been meaning to find a new vet but keep forgetting because I’ve been so busy! I’ll schedule right now”.

Unfortunately, when Sandra calls your practice, she finds out that it’s only open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays - which is the same hours she works. So she puts the postcard in her purse, with the intent to call tomorrow.

From here, one of three things will probably happen:

1. Sandra gets wrapped up in work and forgets to call, postcard out of sight and mind.

2. When she calls on her lunch break, she is put on hold for 6 minutes before giving up and hanging up.

3. She takes a short break from her busy day to call, then proceeds to go back and forth with the receptionist for 7 minutes before finding a set of open appointment times for her that she can “make work”. On the day of the appointment, she no-shows because she forgot about an important meeting she had at that same time and couldn’t go home in time to get her pet.

Sandra was so close to becoming a new client at your practice!

Research backs this up as a fairly common scenario:

• It takes an average of 8.1 minutes to schedule an appointment at an office via phone (Accenture)

• 63% of calls are placed on hold at least once (Accenture) So, how can you close the loop on acquiring potential clients like Sandra?

Easy! Implement online scheduling.

I know what you’re probably thinking, I can feel your hesitation through the screen. 

The last think you want to do is have online scheduling at your vet practice. You aren’t thrilled about the idea of giving up your schedule and asking pet owners to book appointments themselves.

Before you give up and stop reading, ask yourself the question: “If it were possible to implement online scheduling to capture clients like Sandra without losing control of my schedule, would I do it?”

If your answer is yes, then keep reading.

Chckup is really the only fully-integrated, real-time online scheduling platform that allows pet parents to find and schedule appointments with their vet practice online, 24/7.

Chckup directly integrates with your practice management system and you can completely customize it to the specific way that you schedule appointments in your veterinary practice. 

This means that all times are displayed accurately by appointment type, 

No double-bookings and all appointments are written directly into your PIMS without requiring any effort from your front practice staff.

This is no different than what your front desk does when a pet owner calls your clinic. They look at the schedule within the PIMS, take into account all of the scheduling rules that your practice has, and then tell the pet owner what their options are.

With online scheduling, instead of telling them their options over the phone, you are simply giving pet owners the ability to schedule an appointment at your practice at their convenience. 

This closes the loop on all of your current marketing investments and removes the barrier to entry for pet owners like Sandra.