Protect Our Veterinary Receptionists: Upon Whom so Much Depends

In our most recent blog post pack member Naomi looked at Caravaggio. Using AI I've generated a Caravaggio-esque depiction of one of my favourite poems 'The Red Wheelbarrow' by William Carlos Williams.

So much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens

Who is Your Red Wheel Barrow?

It’s a short one and asks more questions than it answers really. But, read it again and then answer for me the following question: Who is the red wheelbarrow in your clinic? Take a minute to think about that carefully, honestly - who do you think it is?

Well, let me give you a clue as to who I think it most often is…

Your Pet Owners Are Already AI Proficient

And yet, imagine what will happen when pet owners start asking their AI assistants to phone each of the 5 local vet clinics to check for availability, or compare prices or opening times. Your calls will increase by five times too. Today AI agents can-and do-call multiple businesses at once. Suddenly you’re inundated. What’s the solution? More receptionists? More phone lines? Do you plan on growing more arms? Or something better for everyone. The key here is to protect your receptionists by arming they with tools to tackle the rising demand effortlessly.

What if AI assistants could book appointments, pay invoices, and reorder medications directly—without ever tying up your phone lines?

Your People in Practice are Key

Serving bots is no fun. No fun at all. Just think of what doing a good job looks like. In general, clients like to feel known. Thats why the people you have in your practice are key and I'll say it again, you need to protect your receptionists! Pet owners want a service tailored to their needs by people they know and that know them. In short, people like people.

But you can't impress an AI assistant by remembering their sick aunt or asking about their son's graduation. There are simply fewer opportunities to value-add through personalization, to build a relationship, and to maximize client retention. Think about what an AI assistant is programmed to “want”. They don't want to feel known. They just want to know. Their job to be done is much more straightforward. Your client’s AI assistant wants to know if you have a slot that matches with the time they've been asked to book. If they could bypass your service representative altogether, reach into your scheduling software and book the slot themselves based on the rules you’ve set, they would. I say, let them!

Not even an artificial half-wit would risk getting rumbled in a human-interaction if it could get the same job done completely digitally. AIs can speak pretty decent English but every single one of them speaks even better binary. Let AI talk with your digital systems. Embrace online payments, purchases, scheduling and digital subscriptions to facilitate this automation. And keep your people for what they do best: serving other people (and their pets!).

If the advent of talking AI assistants isn't incentive enough to digitize your veterinary business's systems and processes then I don't know what is. Do you really want to be paying highly trained team members to provide high touch customer service to a software program? Will you be able to find people willing to do so even if you do? Better to reserve their time for those compelling human touchpoints that digital-only businesses cannot replicate.

Vet Teams Belong at the Heart of the Petcare Journey

Our hand is being forced by the likes of Google, and ultimately by curious, convenience-seeking, constrained consumers just like ourselves. And, in the words of another poet (Robert Frost)

“The best way out is always through.”

This is a discomfort that we must push through together to retain the place of the local veterinary clinic at the heart of the pet care journey. And I’m sorry to say it but that’s the easy bit. There are harder challenges ahead.

Coming Soon

The Wheel barrow appreciation society - join our community of forward thinking receptionists all geared toward becoming more AI proficient so that they can stay a head of the curve with their own team of AI agents.