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Online payments make curbside checkout easy

VSS St Louis now receive over 85% of their revenue online while keeping staff and clients safe

VSS St Louis Client Care Front of House

The problem with operating exclusively curbside

Veterinary Speciality Service St Louis (VSS) is a large 200+ staff Specialty and ER hospital based in Missouri with departments specializing in Critical Care, Cardiology, Internal Medicine, Imaging, Oncology, Rehabilitation and Surgery. With the support of a Communications Centre and front-of-house Client Care team, VSS is committed to providing the best advanced care throughout the region. We caught up with VSS’s IT Support Specialist Amanda Boyd to discuss how incorporating a truly socially distant payment method brought efficiencies to their checkout process in just two months.

VSS has been operating exclusively curbside ever since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, only allowing exceptions for pet owners coming into the premises with pets under dire life or death situations or euthanasia procedures. Having used ezyVet since 2017, Amanda recalls the hospital's transition to a curbside only operation was relatively straightforward, however, the checkout payment portion was anything but. 

As is the case with large hospitals, the responsibility of payment collection and follow-up sits with the Client Care team. VSS’s curbside process before PayJunction ended with the veterinarian advising the client that they will receive a call from a Client Service Representative (CSR) to take care of their charges. This at times included taking credit card details over the phone, and the staff entering the details on behalf of the client. Amanda notes, “It became very obvious right away that the CSRs could not keep up with calling the clients back in real-time [for payments] once the appointments were over so that resulted in a backlog of charges.”

Remote payments as the main payment option

After 9 months of putting up with this painful process, VSS made the decision to bring on PayJunction as an integrated payment provider, after learning about the remote payment feature purposefully built by ezyVet for practices to collect payments online. As a curbside only service meant that clients could not come into the building, there was no need to set up new front desk payment terminal equipment.

Key goals VSS wanted to achieve with remote payments:

  • Alleviate the manual admin workflow for Client Care team
  • Eliminate the chance of human error when collecting and entering
  • Make reconciliation of charges easier for their finance team
  • Keep clients and staff safer with no-touch payment terminals or devices

“The specialty departments basically take care of all of their own payment links for their outpatient appointments, giving the CSRs back time to focus on handling payment links for surgical discharges, ER visits or hospitalized patients.”

Amanda Boyd

IT Support Specialist, Veterinary Speciality Service St Louis

VSSS St Louis Communications Centre

Placing the onus back on the client

With Remote Payments with PayJunction, all a CSR needs to do is send the payment link directly to the client via SMS or email without needing a follow-up call to collect credit card details. When their client clicks on that unique link, they can easily enter the necessary payment information on a web browser page. Not only is this better for PCI compliance, but another major benefit is that the responsibility is now placed back to the client, rather than the CSR, to enter the correct payment details. They can also sign for the payment receipt electronically.

Team work + less phone calls = fast checkout + happy clients

Once the wider clinical team realized how easy it was to send the payment link from within the clinical record, doctors and technicians took it upon themselves to do it too. As ezyVet’s clinical and financial records are linked, it was a practical move to start the payment process straight after the consult or surgery is completed, easing the CSR team’s workload. “The specialty departments basically take care of all of their own payment links for their outpatient appointments," Amanda explains, "giving the CSRs back time to focus on handling payment links for surgical discharges, ER visits or hospitalized patients.”

Clients have taken to this new payment method like a duck to water with Amanda noting that 9 out of 10 clients reacting positively and complying with the new procedure. For the few who are initially hesitant, a simple comparison that it was akin to making a purchase online was enough to convince them.

Amanda concludes with, “The amount of manual checkout transactions that have been removed from our CSR team is incredible. The staff just hopped right on board and their Immediate feedback was, “Why haven't we done this sooner?”.

Ready to start using Remote Payments?

If you are a PayJunction customer, you are able to can use this feature for free after setting it up as a payment method within your ezyVet site.

If you are not yet a PayJunction customer, you can sign up here and receive your first remote payment in 48 hours.

“The amount of manual checkout transactions that have been removed from our CSR team is incredible. The staff just hopped right on board and their Immediate feedback was, “Why haven't we done this sooner?”"

Amanda Boyd

IT Support Specialist, Veterinary Speciality Service St Louis