Three Rings: The Tyranny of the Telephone

No matter what you’re doing you’ve got three rings to answer it.

Three rings or else the pet on the other end of the phone, who might be bleeding out at exactly this moment for all you know, might not get the care they need.

Never mind what you’re doing right now, never mind the pet owner in front of you you’re already trying to serve. Never mind the fact the ringing could just as easily be someone with a non-urgent query calling at precisely the wrong time.

Three rings.

With a text chat you’ve got 30-60 minutes to respond, because you can set client expectations ahead of time with an automated welcome message. And you can prioritise inbound text chats at a glance - you can see what the issue is - before you decide how and when to respond. It gives you control of your workflow. It gives you the power to say: “You know what? I’ll come to that after I’ve grabbed some lunch.”

Thomas Edison once said genius consists of 99% perspiration, that is to say hard work, and only 1% inspiration. That being true, every veterinary professional is at least 99% of the way to genius! And to be fair we have far more than our fair share of smart cookies.

But Ma Yun, founder of Alibaba, disagrees with Edison - brave man - and instead claims that it’s lazy people that really create history. They do this by creating path-of-least-resistance ways of doing things.

Veterinary teams are never going to be lazy. We have far too much inherent drive for that. But maybe we do have a thing or two to learn from Ma Yun. We must now reach for those tools that will help us be even more effective than we are now, while reclaiming some balance - shaking off the tyranny of the telephone and, most of all, allowing us to have our lunch and eat it too.