Good evening, everybody, and welcome to tonight's webinar. My name is Bruce Stevenson, and I have the honour and privilege of chairing tonight's webinar. I'd like to start by thanking our sponsors, Vet Billing.
If it wasn't for their sponsorship, we would not be able to bring you this evening. So a big thank you to our sponsors, vet Billing for tonight. For those of you that are joining us for the first time, quick little bit of housekeeping.
If you move your mouse over the screen, you'll see a control bar pops up. It's normally a black bar at the bottom. On there, there's a Q&A box.
If you just click on that, you can type in any questions that you have for our presenter, and we will hold those over to the end. And, hopefully we'll have enough time to get through them. If we don't, Suzanne has agreed that we can email them through to her so you won't miss out.
The other thing just to remind you is that we are recording these sessions. So they will be up on the webinar vet website in the next 24 or 36 hours. And, if there's any slides you want to go back to, we can't obviously go back to them tonight, but you certainly can rewatch it and when you are watching the recording, you can fast forward and slow down and rewind and stop and do whatever you want to do.
So, very handy and that's up on the webinar vet website in the next 24 or 36 hours. So without further ado, it's my privilege and pleasure to introduce to you our speaker tonight, Suzanne Cannon, who is the co-founder of vet Billing. And she co-founded it in 2014 after a $4000 emergency vet bill for Herschnauzer's pancreatitis catapulted her into an uncomfortable realisation that many pet owners find themselves in without accessible options to financing costs of veterinary care.
Vet Billing's mission is to keep pets and their families together by reducing economic euthanasia and surrenders that are driven by the pet owner's frequency and frequent difficulties in absorbing the full upfront costs of acute surgical or emergency veterinary care. To that end, vet billing equips vet practises with a cloud-based payment management platform that enables them to to provide in-house payment and budgeting plans. To approximately 60% of clients who are ineligible for conventional credit-based financing.
Representing vet billing, Suzanne is an active participant in the organisations and initiatives seeking to develop sustainable solutions to the problem of financing the access to care. Her company has sponsored events at various events like Access to Veterinary Care Coalition, programme for Pet Health Equity at UT Knoxville, the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association, and many others. She has also been interviewed on several podcasts.
Suzanne, welcome to the webinar vet, and it's over to you. Thank you, Bruce. Thank you all for having me and thank you all for attending.
We're going to talk about the term financial friendliness or being financially friendly, which might be a term you've never heard of because I created it a few years ago, and I'm gonna walk you through what does this mean and how does this help us improve access to care and also Rebuild trust in veterinary medicine between vets and their clients. So I'm gonna jump right in because I've, as usual, I have too many slides, too many slides. So what does being financially friendly mean?
The most important thing that I want you to hear from me today is that financially friendly does not mean you're a low cost clinic or a discount provider. This is not really about about your pricing. It's about an ethos or your cultural orientation as a clinic.
So a financially friendly clinic is one that acknowledges and supports clients' financial realities while they're also able to maintain financial sustainability. I mean that for the clinic, the clinic's financial sustainability. So let's kind of go point by point through a financially friendly clinic's characteristics.
The clinic is able to create a judgment-free trust building environment so that cost discussions between the clinic team and clients feel safe and open instead of tense and difficult. Financially friendly clinics tend to offer a wide variety of payment options for clients that come from differing financial circumstances, so not just conventional credit financing, they may also offer in-house financing. They may also offer multiple types of payment methods, and we'll talk about the difference between payment methods and payment options a little bit later.
Financially friendly clinics always use proactive communication to educate clients about available resources for managing the cost of care. They don't wait for clients to ask about it. A lot of clients won't ask about it because they're afraid of being judged or they're embarrassed or they just don't know.
So clinics that proactively let their clients know about payment options, spectrum of care, approach to treatment are financially friendly. The financially friendly clinic also reduces stress. It's a less stressful environment because the orientation toward the clients coming in is how can we make this work instead of, well, we can't help you because we have a policy that payment in full is required upfront or while you may not blame the client to their face in your head, you might be thinking, well, you know, if you had planned better for this, then we wouldn't be in this position.
So it's trying to shift the mindset, the paradigm, to let's make this workable, so we're thinking of ways to get to yes instead of focusing on why we cannot do something. So when you're in that sort of environment, staff feels empowered to have empathetic cost conversations, and those always strengthen client relationships. So again, it's not about prices specifically and I'm not here to talk about or complain about prices at all.
I, you all hear enough complaints about prices from your clients, I'm quite sure. So the price is the price. We're talking about an attitude shift and ethos that's going to make it a little bit easier for clients to cope with the prices, as they are.
So why does this even matter? Why does it matter to have a financially friendly orientation? For one thing, it's because it does foster trust.
It signals to clients that care is going to be somehow accessible when maybe they're very worried it's not. Being transparent and encouraging and having open, honest conversations with clients around financial issues creates a sense of safety, emotional safety, for not just the client but the team as well, because you're less likely to encounter client pushback if you're transparent and you're, you have an orientation towards problem solving. Greater access to veterinary care means better compliance.
So people that are coming in and they're worried about paying for vet care, if they know that there's a way for them to do it that's manageable, they're going to be more willing to comply with your recommendations, whether that's for something like a newly diagnosed serious condition or a surgery or it's routine care. And compassion when clients are treated with how they feel compassionately, this obviously drives loyalty and referrals because they're very grateful that you're willing to work with them to help them figure out the financial part of care. But the bottom line is really that being financially friendly again instead of being about prices or money, it's really about care and connection and really focusing on that.
The other reason that this matters right now is I'm sure you've all heard by now that veterinary prices have outpaced inflation for a number of years now, I mean really over a decade, and that gap has grown quite a lot, especially post pandemic. So you can see there's a pretty big gap here between the red line, which is showing you the consumer price index, and if we have international people, this is for the United States. So 22.3% for the consumer price index in America based inflation for a basket of goods that you're buying, whereas veterinary is up to 35.9%.
And these stats are from last year. I didn't change them because this is relatively unchanged. It's been like this for a while, and clients are very price sensitive because of The perception that it's very expensive.
So even minor price changes in everything, not just veterinary care, but groceries, eggs. There's a lot of talk about eggs if you're in the United States right now, eggs or bacon, changes in those things affect pet spending and vet spending because that is discretionary income. Those things are always paid out of discretionary income.
Most people, they should, but they don't budget for this. So I don't want to go into too much detail about why veterinary costs are what they are, because you guys all know what they are. But just to recap really quickly, it's because we have these incredible advances in technology, diagnostics and treatment.
It's because of the cost of acute surgical specialty or emergency care, and it's because of inflation, as we just said. So all of these things are driving prices upward. And in the face of that, if you're in America, and I don't know how similar it is in the UK and other countries, I think in the UK it is, we have 70% to 78% of all Americans claim they're living paycheck to paycheck.
That is an astonishing number. That's 3 quarters of the American population. That's living paycheck to paycheck, and I want to emphasise that, you know, if you have 3 quarters of the population that's saying this, this is not all lower income households or middle income households, it's also high income households that are living paycheck to paycheck.
So financial challenges are pervasive for everyone, and I want to show you some stats that came out last year that really gave me and a lot of people in veterinary care and animal welfare and access to care movements gave us pause. These stats are from a survey from a company called LendingTree, which does an annual pet debt review. So in their survey last year, they found that 39% of the people they spoke to who currently have a pet say they will not own a pet in the future anymore because it's just gotten too expensive.
The next number that gave me pause for sure is that 12% have surrendered their animals because of affordability issues, but 25% of them are from Gen Z. 25%, like a quarter of Gen Zers, have given up their pets because of cost. And then it's interesting the generational divide here.
You can see the percentage of people who now say they prefer to be petless, and they prefer to be petless because of the expense. Gen Z is way up there at almost half, 46%, Millennials are at 29%, and then you see a really significant drop off when you get to Gen X and boomers. So, They want their pets, that might be because there's more accumulated wealth in those older generations than in Gen Z and millennials who are still in the early years of building their lives.
A full 45% of pet owners survey, and this is a different survey. This came from PetSmart charities. 45% say the cost of veterinary care has kept them from taking their pet to the vet, meaning they're more likely to delay care than they would have been in the past.
There was recently a post on LinkedIn that caught my attention, and it was about veterinary inflation. And most of my colleagues in my network on LinkedIn are other people who either are veterinarians or veterinary professionals or we work with vets. So it's kind of already a biassed sort of group, but I noticed that several of the comments on this post, which was from a veterinary economist, were people that I know and they have pets.
Some of them breed them. Several of them just commented that Where they used to just jump up right away if they saw something that seemed like a symptom in one of their animals. They don't do that now because they're thinking, oh my, how much is this going to cost?
And I would say, I mean, I am in that group and I'm a helicopter mom to my my dogs and I have a horse. I'm a little bit ridiculous when it when it comes to that, and I see something and now I'm like, OK, OK. I immediately think of the cost partly because of what I do and I think, can this wait?
Do I need to call the vet now? And it gives us angst when when that happens. You don't want to have to think about it, but you do.
So 30% of survey respondents say they would struggle to pay a vet bill of $500 or more. So we all know that in VetMed today it's pretty easy to have a $500 bill. It's easy to have bills that are a lot more than that, but even routine preventive care or depending on what you're having done, I mean, it's not that hard to get up to $500.
And 50% of the people in the survey said that they would have to ask friends or family to help them pay for life saving treatment. Of course they had other responses too, like they would use credit, they would use savings, but they don't always have enough available credit. They don't always have enough available savings to do that.
So sometimes they have to do a GoFundMe or they're informally asking people for help. Another interesting statistic in the face of this is that if you look at people's spending habits and how they approach like their cash flow management. 76% of people, and this is a different survey on buy now pay later type of initiatives.
76% are more likely to pay for a big ticket cost or a big ticket item if financing is available. And what's a big ticket item typically that refers to. Manufactured goods like refrigerators, appliances, furniture, certainly automobiles and things like that.
But we're talking items that are in the thousands of dollars from the low thousands all the way up to many, many thousands like if you're buying a car. So if you think about it, anytime you go into a furniture store or you go somewhere where you're possibly going to be buying an appliance, there are signs all over the place about financing. Apply for financing, easy, low cost financing, 0% interest.
You know, or 12 months, 18 months. So you're kind of hit in the face with those things because people are being asked, you know, if you need to buy this item, it's going to be thousands of dollars, and most people cannot pay thousands of dollars upfront all at once. Another interesting thing that this survey found was that 66% of people who want financing for expensive things, they want to know about the instalment plan options that are available way before they're at checkout, like way before they're ready to purchase the item.
They want to know ahead of time. That's an important thing for people in veterinary medicine to be aware of in terms of proactively educating your clients about your payment options. So it's important, and I'm sure that you guys know this from the clients that you work with, that even those who are fully committed to getting the best care for their pets, they are looking for alternatives to payment in full all at once, and that's generally been the policy of most vet clinics.
And it, and it really actually continues to be apart from third party financing that that some clinics offer, but apart from that, like if you don't use CareCredit or Scratch Pay or one of those, the alternative is payment in full all at once. So the reason that this is difficult for people is is because of a a bias called loss aversion, but I want to talk about this other interesting phenomenon called the payment mechanism effect. There was a study some years back.
It was back in 2012. I found this study in the Journal of Consumer Research that When payment options are available, like the ability to pay over time and not have to pay all at once, that the customers in the study that they did, they were free to focus on the value and benefits of what they were purchasing because they knew they could finance it, they could pay over time. So it sort of unburdened them from focusing on the cost, and instead they could look at what was good about what they were buying and I know we talk inventMed all the time about we really want clients to understand the value.
I happen to think that most clients really do understand the value, but they can't access that value. So if we give them the ability to spread out payments. Using whatever option your clinic uses, then they're going to be maybe more able to appreciate and enjoy that value, but I don't think it's that they don't get it.
I think they feel that it's it's out of reach. So in that same study, There there are customers who were given a situation in which full payment is required and there was no credit option available. There's no chance to spread the cost out over time, you have to pay in full all at once.
And they found that when that was the case, those customers focused and fixated. On the costs, like that was all that they could think about was how much it was going to cost them and how much it was going to set them back and it made them anxious and it also made them more likely to pick an inferior product or service just so that they could Not have as big of a cost to worry about. So, with veterinary clients, if you're presenting an estimate, and we're gonna talk about not even calling them estimates anymore in a little bit, They're going to see that number and when they don't know there's payment options available or ways to mitigate that all at once cost, they are automatically probably going to opt for less care than what they really want or maybe even what their pet needs, and I'm sure that so many of you deal with this on a daily basis.
There was another paper published last year actually by people who work with the veterinary industry from Cornell, and they found that offering payment plans in veterinary care reduces the pain of payment and it increases client willingness to approve recommended care. I think that's just sort of common sense, but the pain of payment is an interesting thing when you offer somebody the ability to pay over time a payment option. Why that works and helps them move forward with treatment is because it decouples the pain of the payment from what they're actually paying for.
So they're like I said above, they don't have to focus only on the number, they're kind of free to focus on getting what's needed for their animal. So that being said, what are some simple practical steps you can do at your clinic to become financially friendly, and I want to tell you right now these are not hard. I am not a genius, and these are really just common sense things that you can think about and put into place that start signalling to clients that, hey, you know, we're really willing to work with you on this.
We understand that you're really sensitive to cost. So in the first place you want to start with rethinking your messaging maybe around your payment policies and even the signs in your clinic, and you want to try to shift your tone from rigid and inflexible to reassuring. And I want to show you something that most of you are familiar with.
So most of the clinics that I've ever been in, including my own vets, the sign, oops, I hit my cursor too quickly. The sign you usually see is payment is due when services are rendered. That will also be on the website.
I mean, in, in my vet, I think it's posted in every exam room. So you see that and that can feel intimidating to clients like they're already dreading what they're. They're going to hear when they're checking out, like what is that invoice going to be?
And then they've seen the sign, and in some vets I've seen them, they're all in caps and they have an exclamation point, so it, it feels really scary. So they also perceive that as rigid. Like, can I question that?
And they may not even know that you have financing options. We all tend to think, well, they must know we have CareCredit or they must know we have Scripay because we're all familiar with it. We deal with it every day.
You would be surprised how many clients don't know that you offer this, so don't assume that they know or that they will ask. That's why it's better to be proactive about this. So instead of having these signs, and I realised that this might be scary to some people to think about not having that sign, but here we go.
You would be better off reframing that messaging into something that's more welcoming and oriented toward finding solutions. So replacing those signs with something that says, hey, let us help you manage unexpected veterinary bills. Ask us about our flexible financing options or post these things everywhere.
So think about changing your messaging from What you know, we're we're not going to work with you. Payment is due when services are rendered to. Oh, we understand that sometimes this is really difficult, so let's talk about what we can do.
So that goes back to the paradigm shift to how can we work this out instead of, oh no, we can't do this because it's our policy. So this is an example of posters that are in a couple of clinics that work with vet billing so that I know, and they feature actually various payment options that they offer. One has a pet health savings account that they run through vet billing.
We manage that for them. But as you can see, especially on this first one, you can't put a price on love, but we can help you budget for it, and it's, you know, an older woman hugging a puppy, that's kind of a softer messaging there and even the wording saying community pet care clinic has a financial support system to help you manage the cost of veterinary care. That helps put people at ease when they see things like that.
The other poster basically just gives the facts about the different payment options that are offered, how they work, how much you have to spend, what's the maximum, and things like that. But the softer messaging is something that clients really appreciate and it helps really reduce their anxiety. So as I'm saying this, I want you to realise that just because you change your messaging or your signs doesn't mean that you have to change your policy.
By far, most clients are still going to be paying in full for what they're coming to get routine care, vaccinations, annual exams, or whatever. So you, you don't have to change your policy, you're just shifting in flexible sounding messaging into a different tone, and that tone feels more approachable, not so intimidating. It's letting the client know, hey, we're willing to problem solve with you versus issuing an ultimatum, like, well you better pay in full or else.
It encourages open and solutions focused conversations. So, and by the way, You know, you don't need to say to clients, well, you better pay in full or else. I mean, this doesn't lead to clients not paying.
That's another webinar though, but our our data of that billing shows that that's actually not the case. Another way you can let people know that you're a financially friendly clinic is use your social media to convey this messaging. I rarely see this mentioned in social media from vet clinics, but You should be highlighting your payment options and post about all of them, or if you only use one post about one, but whichever ones you use, make sure that you share posts about that.
If you can, it's really great to share client success stories, you know, if they were able to finance something, they were able to access care because they were able to use one of your payment options, let your followers know that. If you have somebody on your team that likes doing videos and they're extroverted, you could have them post short videos where they just talk people through what the payment options are. Hey, this is what we can do for you, and we know that sometimes expenses catch you off guard, but here's what we have to help you.
You can use Q&A type posts in your social media. Just answer the questions that you know that clients are already asking you when they're maybe in the clinic or they're on the phone. Go ahead and answer them on social media.
Yes, we have payment plans. Yes, we have financing, and I recommend that really you try to post about this at least twice a month so that message is constantly going out and your clients are aware of this. Oops, I gotta go back, sorry.
This is an example of a post that comes from one of vet billing's partner clinics. It's Veterinary Urgent Care. They're located in Houston, Texas, and they post regularly about this kind of thing.
So as you can see, this came from earlier this month in February. They had a kind of corso named Capone who had eaten a bunch of pacifiers and so it was a foreign body removal and those can get very expensive, as you all know, and they wanted to let people know their clients or followers know what happened to. He didn't swallow just one but 3 pacifiers, and one had already gone to his intestines, but that they were able to move forward by making that foreign body removal procedure affordable for his family because they set them up on a payment plan through vet billing so he could get the care he needed immediately without a terrible financial strain or sadly.
Without having to euthanize or surrender, I mean, how can you look at that face and imagine euthanizing him or surrendering him? I mean he looks very sad there. He was in recovery at that point, but this is an example of, like I said, this clinic does this fairly regularly.
Another place you can signal your financial friendliness is definitely on your website, so you want to make sure that the payment options you offer are easy to find. You don't want your clients to have to go hunting for those payment options. Make it really easy and really clear for them to find.
So the best practises you can use for your website, and I know everybody can't run out and go, you know, change their website today or tomorrow or whenever, but the best practise is you actually have a dedicated payment options page, and a lot of clinics do, and that's a great thing, and they usually just have a blurb explaining that, you know, we know unexpected costs can be stressful. Here are the options that we offer. But if you, if you can't have a whole page or you don't have a web developer to set up a new page for you, you can also add your payment option information into an existing drop down menu that you already have.
So you probably already have a client resources drop down or an about us, you know, something like that. You can add it there. So instead of creating a whole new page, you're just adding some information to an existing drop down.
You can also just feature your payment option information in your website footer, so it's there on every page, no matter where the client is looking, it just kind of follows them. So that's really prime real estate for key information that you want to make sure your clients see. Another thing you could do is a pop up for visibility, you know, a pop up that says, Hey, did you know that we have flexible payment plans?
Do you know that we offer easy financing, you know, click to learn more or ask a team member. So this is an example of a clinic that Added it to a drop down. So under their resources tab, They have all these things, but they also have CareCredit, Scratch Pay, and then their payment policies, so they added that there.
This is a dedicated page where they have a tonne of information. And one of the things that I really love about this page is that they have this little introduction here that's very financially friendly. It's very sympathetic.
Like we get that your pet's a family member and when family members are sick or injured, it's impossible to not feel stressed and worried. We don't want you to have to worry about paying on top of what you're already worried about, and that's why we offer all these financing options. And let me tell you, so they have these 4 that you see here.
That was all I could fit in a screenshot. So they have a lot more than that. So you can certainly check out multiple options if you don't know about my company vet billing, check us out, there's Sunbit, .
There's verity, there's there's a lot of them out there. This is a dedicated page from a vet billing partner hospital. That's an emergency hospital in Michigan.
And again they have an actual financing tab so it's very easy to find because it's right at the top and this is an entirely dedicated page just to their financing options and it really completely explains everything step by step to clients so they know ahead of time how each one of these work vet billing as well as scratch Pay and CareCredit. So the things that you don't want to do on your website is if you don't have payment options on your website at all, that's not so good. You might want to think about adding them because if you actually do have them but you don't share that information, your clients won't assume that you offer them and like I said earlier, you would be surprised how many clients just don't even know that vets offer financing.
And you'll ask them like, I've done this before in shadowing in clinics that are partner clinics, and the vet leaves the room and I'll talk to the clients and they might share with me that they're worried about the price. They didn't share it with the veterinarian, but I was like this neutral person in the room that wasn't there. They they didn't think I would judge them and so they would just tell me and I would ask them, What do you know about CareCredit?
And some of them didn't know more than I thought. And others of them knew about it, and they said, well, yeah, I've I've used it at my dentist before, but I didn't know I could do it at my vet. So again, this goes back to the importance of being proactive and letting your clients know.
So you should have something on your website that that tells them. How they can manage unexpected costs. And then the other thing we've already talked about, if you don't want your payment options to be really hard to find, they're hidden in your FAQs or they're deep down in some other menu, and believe me, I've spent a long time on some website.
Looking for their payment options and I have found them in the most weird places. Sometimes I find them in the Contact Us page or pages that don't make any sense at all, and I literally spent 20 minutes trying to find it and I'm not their client. I'm just looking at veterinary websites a lot, so you don't want that to happen to your clients.
So and because you will never know how many potentially new clients just bypass your clinic because they can't find that information because trust me, clients are looking for this information now, especially they are looking for financial relief and they want to be able to find that at their clinic. So I mentioned earlier about the difference between payment methods and payment options, and I said I'd get into it here. So one thing that I see a lot of clinics do on their section of their website that says they have payment options, they actually are listing payment methods.
And they'll say, oh, our payment options are Visa, Mastercard, American Express, checks, and cash. Those are all really traditional forms of payment that are used for transactions. Those are standard and expected in most, if not all, businesses.
Those are just methods of payment. Payment options are things that allow clients to manage costs by paying over time in instalments. So that's either third party financing or flexible in-house payment plans.
And those examples include the ones we've already mentioned before. All pet card is one that I forgot to mention earlier. So vet billing, CareCredit, Scratch Pay, all, all pet cards, Sunbit for those in other countries, you probably don't have those.
I don't know, but that's the difference between payment options and payment methods. And sometimes payment methods is all I see. But when that's all you list and you want to try to pretend to people that these are flexible payment options like you're not fooling them, and the reason that that's not.
If it's not effective is when you list only payment methods, that's not addressing any of the clients' concerns about affordability if they're already worrying about costs, but if you highlight your payment options, that's reassuring, that helps reduce anxiety, and that helps build trust. They're like, OK, hey, they have ways to help me manage the cost. So the other thing you want to do, obviously this won't be a surprise at this point in the webinar is you want to be displaying your payment options everywhere in your clinic.
I mean, you don't need to get wallpaper that has your payment options on it, but good places to display on the different kinds of financing you offer would be your front door, your windows, those clingy decals you can put in windows or stickers, your reception and checkout area have, you know, definitely high vis signs and brochures also have it in your exam rooms, not just brochures, especially brochures that are racks with a whole lot of other things, but like a dedicated brochure rack. And definitely poster signs, because we pet owners end up sitting in the exam room. Sometimes you take our animal out and we're there for a while.
And yeah, I guess a lot of us look at our phones, but at some point we might be just looking around the room and seeing things. And even if it does doesn't go consciously in at the time. It goes sort of subliminally in like, oh hey, I've seen that somewhere.
I think, I think my vet has payment options. So definitely the exam room, waiting area, that's basically the same as reception and checkout for a lot of you. And another place to have it, this is a display, it's auditory, is if you have on hold messaging when your clients are on hold and it's playing information about your clinic.
I hardly ever hear on hold messages that include information about payment options. I hear all kinds of other stuff, but I don't often hear that. There are some that do it, but it's not really common, and that's really just you definitely don't want to waste that opportunity there to passively and proactively educate your clients.
So I have a little clip here about how you'll afford quality veterinary care. That's why we're pleased to offer a variety of payment options, including CareCredit and Scratch Pay. Both offer low and no interest financing with simple, friendly payment plans.
You can use CareCredit and Scratch Pay for everything from your pet's annual exams and vaccines to dental cleanings, diagnostic testing, even prescriptions and diet foods. OK, so you guys get the idea that was one clip that I got from a company that does on hold messaging for vets. They're called pause time.
If you're looking for on hold messaging, I highly recommend getting in touch with them. They are great. They are really hands on.
They're a smaller team. See here, the webinar is sponsored by me and my company and I'm advertising pause time. But anyway, check them out.
OK, I mentioned this earlier. Stop calling them estimates when you go, you know, you're getting ready to present your treatment plan to clients, which is your treatment plan, but we're often calling them estimates. And can you think of a time when you ever hear the word estimate that you don't have anxiety and dread about it?
Cause usually what comes after that is a number. That you don't want to hear. So estimate for car repair or your roof or a home repair.
It's like, oh my gosh, that it's kind of a loaded word. So as soon as you're saying let's go over your estimate, It's triggering that dread. People are bracing themselves for bad news that it's going to be, it's like, oh my gosh, I'm going to struggle to afford this.
And it also shifts the focus away from the value and onto the cost, just using the word estimate. So just changing that one word and saying treatment plan or care plan instead of estimate can make a difference. It's a small, simple thing that can have a big impact, and I know some of you do this already, but it's easy to like stay in the habit of just calling them estimates.
I mean, even I do that. But try to get in the habit of not saying that word. Just say your treatment plan, your care plan.
So your clients, they're obviously they're still going to see the cost, but they're not already defensive or feeling blindsided before you even get going. Another recommendation that comes from Debbie Boone, who's a veterinary management consultant, and I really love this, is that she says when you're going over that treatment plan, And there's all these line items on there. She said when she was a practise manager, she used to have a blank piece of paper that she kept, and she like concealed the whole list, and she would just reveal each line item as she went.
So that because when you show people the full thing, they usually immediately go look to the to the full amount due and then they're like freaked out and they have a harder time hearing the rest of what you're saying because they're focused on the cost like we talked about with that payment mechanism effect they're already thinking about how can I not pay this much money. Or how am I going to manage this and and they're anxious. So just simple word shifts can shape how your clients feel.
These are a bunch of stickers that we made at vet billing for actually one of our clients asked us if we had stickers that we could send, and they actually put them on their treatment plans before they present them to the client, a sticker that goes right on there. Hey yes, we offer, we offer payment plans. Reviewing charges with clients.
I've got to get going because I'm going to run out of time here. Another very simple thing that you can do, going over exactly what transpired with clients at checkout, although I recommend doing it before if you can do that with them in the room, so there's some privacy where you're just going to be explaining the itemised breakdown. And again, I know a lot of you do this.
I know a lot of CSRs do it, but it's really important. But explaining it, going over what was done, why did we do it, and the reason that I say this is important is because your client's in the room and they're seeing the vet do an exam, they don't know exactly what's going on. So they don't know, for example, if they brought their pet in to have an eye exam that probably 3 different billable procedures are happening while the vet is looking at their dog's eye, but all they see is the vet doing something with the eye.
So. You definitely want to be explaining to them that there were multiple things that were happening here, and they're going to understand there are separate charges for each one of those. So you definitely also wanna always be proactively reminding clients about your available payment options before they're sticker shocked.
So ideally as a financially friendly practise, you want to be highlighting your payment options at multiple client touch points. You can include them on your client intake forms, whether they're paper or digital. It could be just a simple checkbox.
Would you like information about our payment options? You can add them to reminder emails and texts, just, you know, a line at the bottom. 11 of our vet clinics, one of my old vet clinics did that.
We offer payment plans. Ask us about it. And website forms.
So if you have an appointment request page, you could add it there. Finally, and I know many of you have this as well, an in-house angel fund or charitable fund, there's different ways of doing this. You do it DIY do it yourself and set up your own.
You can partner with an established nonprofit that will collect donations on your behalf and learn from what other clinics do and how they structure them. So, if you're gonna set up your own, you do want to define who, what's your funding source gonna be? Are you gonna raise this money from your clients, .
Ideally you should establish some eligibility criteria for who will qualify for your help from your angel fund because that makes it easier. It's if you're applying sort of the same standards to every case and you want to be aware of your numbers, looking at your your profit. You want to allocate to the fund a percentage that's realistic if if you're going to dedicate a portion of the clinic's funds to your angel fund.
Alternatively, you could partner with, there's organisations that will help you do this. One is the Veterinary Care Foundation that some of you might even use, and also Chappie and Friends, so you can find those on the web. And as far as learning what other clinics do, there's a great article from Stacy Santi, Dr.
Stacy Santi, that was in today's veterinary business actually I think like a year and a half ago, but this remains as one of the best articles for seeing how they set up their angel fund, what she did, because it was very well thought out. So I have the link to that if anybody wants to get that. OK, finally into the communication tips, we really want to work on using empathy because empathy is a connector, a collaborator, and a problem solver.
If you're not using empathy, you're getting defensiveness and like you're not moving anywhere. So I always say to people that if clients push back on the cost of something, a lot of times we immediately want to we're feeling defensive, like, oh, here we go again, and feel like you want to justify or explain, instead of that getting mad, get curious, instead of furious, like, maybe what's going on with them? Why are they asking about this?
So one of the things you can do to help you get through communicating with clients is a skill called mirroring, so we can definitely learn this. It's just when we're putting words to someone's experience and sharing it back to them to show them that we understand or that we don't. So let them clarify.
So you can say like I can see you're very upset about what's happened to your dog and you're really worried about the cost. That's mirroring. The client may not have said that.
They might be expressing that in their body language, in their facial expression, but you're just saying this is what I'm observing, and then you're giving that client a chance to say yes or no. So, how do you do mirroring? Number one is you have to listen carefully and attentively to what the client's saying.
2, you have to try to be able to imagine their perspective and their feelings, even if you don't agree with it. Try to imagine where they're coming from. You want to try to stay out of judgement.
And you're going to just paraphrase their feelings and their problems back to them. So these are some handy little sentence stems that you can use with clients that will put you into a mirroring communication mode, so saying things like, well, it sounds like you're feeling, or I wonder if you feel, or it seems like you need, you know, things like that. So mirroring sentences usually start with these sort of opening phrases.
You can also use partnership statements and basically all that is is using a lot of words like us or together or we. Just those simple changes in your pronouns can help a client feel less isolated and alone when maybe they're really stressing out about the cost of care and they're worried about their animal. So that's a really simple one.
So just even saying, OK, before we make any decisions, so you're demonstrating partnership by saying we, I wonder if we could discuss your financial concerns. And that's also going to elicit the client's perspective, and I'll talk about that again in the next slide because you're you're asking them to give you some information there. This one has mirroring and partnership in it and the client's perspective, so I understand you didn't expect to encounter these costs when you came in.
That's mirroring. So let's explore what solutions we might be able to come with to get come up with together. To manage this unexpected expense.
Eliciting the client's perspective, this is really important because you really don't know what it is. We can make assumptions about it, but that helps them feel like they're heard and valued, and it also sets the tone for collaboration. And this is usually done by asking open-ended questions, you know, how does this estimate fit in your family's budget?
So open-ended statements, not things that the client was just going to answer yes or no, and they often start with words like tell, you know, tell me more about your financial concerns, share, share with me your feelings about the cause of the procedure, and help, you know, help me understand the constraints you have. So why does, why is this important? It's because empathic communication, even if you're not feeling empathy, I have another course on that.
If you guys want to take that, I'll give you some information that goes into more detail. But empathy reduces tension. It builds trust.
It helps people feel emotionally safe, both the client and the team. But this isn't really about being nice to clients just for the sake of being nice. Some of you might be like, Well, I don't want to be nice to them.
Some of them are kind of awful to us. But this is really about something that's called enlightened self-interest, which is a term that I got from a couples therapist. So if anyone knows about empathy working two ways to repair relationships, it's a couples therapist.
And he says, when you're making things better for others, you're making things better for yourself. So this is for you, it's not just for the client. Obviously, again, almost, I'm sure all of you use the spectrum of care or contextualised care approach to deciding on treatment plans, that's just treatment option, a range of options that fit the owner's budget, and financially friendly clinics don't just offer multiple payment options, they offer choices in care.
Tools and resources for any further learning about that contextualised care, which is more of a UK-based thing. We call it spectrum of care here. Contextualised care is a little bit different and really interesting.
You can find more information about that at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons website. Thank you, Dr. Ruth Sterlin, for telling me about that resource.
You can also follow Dr. Kate Boatwright here in the United States at writetheboat.com.
She does some great material on spectrum of care, very specific stuff. Get on her mailing list. Finally, American Animal Hospital Association, AHA just updated their community care guidelines for small animal practise last year, and they're really shifting away from advocating for this gold standard of veterinary care to something that's more inclusive.
And it emphasises using that spectrum of care approach because of the diverse financial situations that clients are in and increasing the accessibility and affordability of veterinary services. So you can also find that information online. About their new updated community care guidelines, it goes into a lot of detail and it also talks about partnering with nonprofits in your community to help clients afford care like a clinic I know gets vouchers from the Asheville Humane Society in North Carolina that will help some of their clients afford spays and neuters, so they, they make partnerships with other nonprofits in their area.
So wrapping it up, what are the benefits of being a financially friendly clinic, it's really, it's it's about creating a perception. It doesn't mean you're lying, it's just what are you emphasising and creating a perception perception of. So for your team.
It helps reduce moral distress. There's less of an emotional burden if you're offering lots of payment options and you're not getting into defensive conflict with clients. Everything feels a little bit more supportive.
It definitely strengthens client trust and loyalty, but I haven't spent a lot of time on this, but the business benefits of it are obviously that can increase case. And stabilise your your revenue because your revenue growth shouldn't rely only on price increases like we, we see in the United States right now revenue is up at most clinics, but client visits are down, so that's reflecting the increased prices. That's also because client visits are down.
It's telling you clients are going, Hey, I'm waiting to come in or I'm not coming in. You don't want them to do that. So we get right to the end and I'm like not a salesperson, I'm more of a teacher, but here's a little bit of information about what vet billing does.
We're in the United States. Basically we manage in-house payment plans for veterinary practises, and I know some of you are probably like, oh, in-house payment plans. Oh my God, but this is completely different, .
We automate all of the recurring payments. We have contract templates. You log into our platform and basically you're creating the contracts.
You have all the control, but we take care of all the work for you, including resolving missed payments, doing. Activity, whatever it is, we take care of it. We also provide you complete training and support when you sign on with us so you know how to use the platform.
But I always tell people using the platform, if you can do online shopping, you can use our platform. It's very user friendly. Fees Your clinic just pays a monthly fee for access to our platform.
Like we don't charge a merchant fee like CareCredit might charge 5% to 15% to be able to offer their financing. We don't take a percentage, it's just a flat monthly fee. Your clients will pay a one-time fee of $25 to activate the plan.
And then a $3 fee is added to each recurring payment, and that's it. So there's no chance they're going to get hit with retroactive interest that's $29 or 34% or something like that. You can find us at vetbilling.com.
There's our phone number up there. You can email us at [email protected].
And you can also contact me, Suzanne at vetbilling.com. I always put my number on there.
I actually take my calls, so if you have any questions and you want to call me, I will answer the phone and I will talk to you. Thank you all very much for letting me present this topic to you. I hope that it was helpful.
Suzanne, thank you so much for sharing all that information with us and thank you to you and your company, vet Billing for sponsoring the webinar this evening. So thank you for your time. We have had, quite a few questions coming through.
The first one, and, and what seems to be a recurring theme, but of, high importance is, is your company providing a service and available in the UK? It is not, and I am so sad to tell you guys that. If you want to find an investor that can help us expand over there, we would love to because we know that this is a prevalent issue in the UK.
At least as much as it is in the United States. Although in the UK you have much higher insurance rates, that's a whole other webinar I could give talking about pet insurance and how it's it's not as helpful as we we hoped it would be when it first came out, but we are not currently available in the UK or Canada, just in the United States. OK.
Petty. The next question we've got coming through is, they didn't give their name, but they've said they are worried that offering payment plans, will in fact damage the practise cash flow. Yes, that's really a common concern.
It's, it's something that we've dealt with for the 10 years that we've had vet billing, and generally if you've offered payment plans before yourself, your clinic and your clinic tried to manage them. It probably didn't damage your cash flow because payment compliance is very low. That's generally because clinics are not payment experts like our staff at vet billing.
I mean, you have another job to do. You might be a tech or a CSR, and like once a week you're the one that's making the calls to people that haven't paid their bill that you put on a payment plan or you're holding postdated checks or you're keeping their credit card number and running that once a month. With vet billing it's completely different.
It's a contract. They're also paying extra. To get into this payment plan programme and we purposely charge a fee to the pet owners because that's like saying, hey, you have skin in the game and if you want your vet to extend a pay over time option to you.
You're going to pay a little bit extra for it. And a funny story I heard from one of our clinic partners was they had one of those clients. He'd been with them for years and they always knew that when it came time to check out, he would hem and haw and be like, Oh, you know, I don't, I really don't think I can pay all of this today.
Can I stop by Tuesday and bring you the rest? And it was the same song and danced every time. And then they switched to using vet billing, so that's, it's more of a standardised formalised approach to offering people payment plans instead of this casual, oh let me give you $50 today or whatever.
So when he came in after they adopted vet billing, They said, Oh, sure, Mr. Smith, here's how we do it now. We use vet billing and it's $25 to enrol and you need to put a down payment down.
It's and then he looks at them and he goes, Ah, you know, he said, I think I'll just pay in full. So that guy could always pay in full. He was just being a pain in the butt.
But I loved that that incentivized him to pay in full because we do want this method to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you really can pay in full, we want you to do it. We want you to pay your vet, but if you really can't, we want you to be able to get the care and move forward anyway and also have your vet get paid instead of the vet having to discount it or having to write it off or the awful options of of euthanasia.
So if you're curious. About how this is impacting clinics revenue. Go on our website.
We have some information there. It actually is increasing their revenue, and the reason that that happens is because they're able to take cases that maybe they otherwise would not have taken. And the other reason is it doesn't damage cash flow is because at any given time.
You probably wouldn't have more than 10% of your entire client base on an active payment plan. The majority of the rest of your clients are going to still be paying you in full, and we encourage our clinic partners to develop policies around offering payment plans that say for example you can't get a payment plan if your balance is less than $250. It has to be $150 or up for us to even think about it.
The maximum time you have to pay back is 3 months or 6 months or, you know, and sometimes they associate that with the total invoice amount. So different payback periods depending on the invoice. Well, that was great.
You've just answered the questions that we had as well. So thank you for that, just as well because we have run out of time. So once again, Suzanne, thank you for tonight and to your company, that Billing for sponsoring this.
I know you are not available in the UK, but that doesn't take away the importance of the information that you have shared with us. So a big thank you for you. You're very welcome.
You guys can do all of this anyway in the UK. To everybody that's attended tonight, thank you so much for your time. I hope you got some great info out of this.
And last but not least, to Beck my controller in the background for making everything run smoothly. Thank you so much. From myself, Bruce Stevenson, it's goodnight.
