Click here to download the transcript.
The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.
Here are some addiotnal gifts for VCITA:
Start a free trial from our website by using this link: https://www.vcita.com/?invite=Webinar&utm_source=Facebook&utm_campaign=Julieshow
Cchedule a demo with this link: https://live.vcita.com/site/vcita.sales/online-scheduling?service=289tixik1ymrp6hw&vtm_cp=Julieshow&invite=Webinar
You can also contact Rachel Rachel@vcita.com
Welcome to ChiroSecure’s empowering women in chiropractic the Facebook live show for successful women by successful women. Proving once again, women make it happen. Join us each week as we bring you the best in business growth, practice management, social media, marketing, networking leadership, and lots more. If it’s about women in practice and business, you’ll hear it here. [inaudible] now join. Today’s host dr. Julie McLaughlin, as she talks, learning, living, and teaching. And now here’s dr. Julie.
Hello everybody Dr. Julie McLaughlin here from Vital Health Protocols with Empowering Women in Chiropractic. I’m so happy you joined me today and thank you so much, ChiroSecure for putting the show on. So let’s everybody give them thumbs up and in some love, and, uh, let’s get started. I want to make sure that you all are going to be introduced to my friend, Rachel superhero from the VCITA. Rachel is a marketing expert who specializes in helping businesses make the most of technology. She started her very first business when she was still in college, helping local small businesses build their web presence and shift from offline to online. Rachel is currently the product marketing manager at VCITA, which I love that it’s at all. And it’s all in one platform. It helps small businesses manage clients appointments and scheduling from one place. Rachel manages the communication with the CDs community over a hundred thousand business owners. So Rachel, welcome to empowering women. Hi Julie. It’s so great to be here. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited about today’s show. Uh, it’s going to be great. We have so many things. I’ve so many questions for you, so let’s get started. So what are you seeing to be the most common created businesses challenges that you’ve seen because you have a lot of customers, I’m sure you’ve seen a lot.
Absolutely. So first of all, um, this is, uh, we can bring up our slides. Now. This is, I mean, this is a really great question because I think, you know, everyone is dealing with, with their own, you know, challenges. I mean, I’ve, I’ve been working from home now for almost six months and, you know, with two little girls at home, it has, wow. I mean, it’s, it’s a completely different reality. Um, and I think it’s very helpful to sometimes hear about, you know, other, other business owners and other doctor’s challenges to kind of help and brainstorm as a community and come together with solutions that can really help us and, you know, share the knowledge, share the tips. I’ve been seeing a lot of that lately and I’m really loving it. Um, we’ve been hearing really, there’s a very wide range of challenges. Um, I think there’s, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of stuff that kind of has to do with regulation.
It depends a lot on where in the world you’re from, but things are changing so fast. You know, there’s, there’s different restrictions. Like how many people you can have in your rating room at once, or, you know, what happens if someone calls in from someone, a patient that was in your clinic last week calls up and says, you know, Oh, I’m a confirmed patient. You know, what do you do next? You have to close down. There’s just like, it’s, if things keep it’s just like sort of continues to shift and it’s, it’s very hard to sort of comply with all that and change your clinic and change your, you know, your workflows so fast to match all that into, you know, keep your, yourself and your team and your customers safe. Um, there’s also a lot of challenges with kind of, you know, people, um, either having to reduce their head count or having people go out on sick leave or just, you know, sort of managing their clinic and, and sometimes the same volume of customers, but with a smaller skeleton staff.
So there’s all these stuff that you might have, you know, you might have a person that usually does your scheduling or your billing, and suddenly you’re stuck doing, seeing your patients and doing so many of these additional administrative tasks that are so time consuming and sometimes really hard to juggle with everything else that’s going on. Um, we’ve, we’ve also heard a lot about, you know, um, doctors that are, that are seeing a decrease in volume, seeing less patients coming in, a lot of patients that are concerned, high risk patients that may be worried about leaving the house and orient, you know, try to really reduce, you know, the time they spend out of their home and maybe even avoid coming into for routine checkups or anything that really isn’t an emergency.
Yeah. Oh, I totally get it. I have seen all of those things in my practice and I know you see businesses all over the world and it’s interesting. We are all, all feeling the same pain. So what kind of tax tasks that you do, um, can be automated? How can we make this easier for us to navigate this crazy as you guys have to see this a business unusual?
Absolutely unusual. Unusual is I guess the word it’s, um, it’s really, I mean, there’s so many logistics that are going on, you know, so, so like we talked about before a little bit, how, you know, suddenly, you know, you have to be on the phone and answer the phone and, and schedule patients and reschedule patients. And, you know, people are calling you up and saying, you know, Oh, I can’t come in on Monday. I have to come in next week. Or, you know, someone suddenly, you know, you’ve, you’ve reserved a space for someone and suddenly they just don’t show up. There’s just like all these logistics and all these moving pieces when it comes to coordinating your schedule. And, you know, you’re spending precious time on all these additional tasks and that’s time that you easily could have been spending senior clients. So the first element is really getting the scheduling down, you know, finding a workflow that works for you and works for your staff, finding a way to sort of automate that, not sitting on the phone day in, day out, getting people to fill in your slots, giving people, um, hopefully like an automatic way where they can see your availability and find this lock that works best for them.
Um, there’s also a lot of stuff with payments. So, you know, calling people on the phone, reminding them about payments, or even just, you know, having people call in and give you the credit card. There’s also a safety issue with payments. Now, you know, some, some I’ve heard like from a couple of staff members saying that they feel uncomfortable handling cash or handling, you know, whatever hundreds of credit cards, every single week, there’s just sort of like another something that you have to worry about. So finding a way to sort of digitalize your, um, your payment flow is actually something that can be extremely helpful and help you keep your team safe, which is major. Oh, I love that. Yeah.
Yeah. I love that touchless payment. And, uh, it, it takes the whole payment process away from any kind of exposure. Right. But it also helps you really get down to the business that you need to help the patient and you don’t have to deal with that payment because it’s all automated. Do you ever find that some doctors worry that it’s not the personal experience with the automation?
So that’s, that’s interesting. That’s something that we, that I do that does come up a lot with conversation with doctors and other small business owners, you know? Cause when you serve a community, when you’re working in a community, you have, you do have these relationships with people, you know, it’s like, I’m sure this happens all the time that you’ll see someone like, I dunno in the supermarket or something, they’re like, Hey, you know, you haven’t been to the clinic in awhile. And I think that’s something that, you know, it’s, it’s really an asset for your clinic because your relationships, that’s, that’s one, probably one of your businesses, you know, most precious assets and you don’t want to definitely don’t want to lose that. You don’t want to compromise your level of service, but when you work with the right tools, I find that you can actually enhance that connection and strengthen those relationships.
So like for example, what we do with the VCITA, we have these automated, um, text message and email reminders that go out before meetings. So like, Hey, don’t forget. You know, I’m really looking forward to seeing you tomorrow or thank you so much for dropping by this week. We look forward to seeing you again, these, you know, these little, it’s like the small gestures, these text messages and emails really go a long way and actually do help you give that extra personal experience that you, might’ve not even been able to give if you didn’t have these tools in place.
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. I know. I can’t believe
Since I did this automation because Hyde lost my staff and I came back. It was just me. And so I’ve been doing these and I’ve been able to realize that patients make appointments at like one or two in the morning. You know, they’re not telling novice, but they’re able to do it through your automation. I love that. That’s great. It really gives you, I think once you have this online scheduling system where anyone can access anytime and from any device in anywhere, it really it’s kind of like staying, you know, keeping the lights on 24 seven. Cause you know, people would have a busy day at work. They don’t necessarily have time to call the clinic, but they will have time to, you know, log into your client portal at whatever it is before they go to bed and schedule their next appointment. That’s awesome.
So what does that look like? So I do have a couple of screenshots that I grabbed off your own website. Joey, you did a great job setting this up and you guys, this is, this is Julie’s website. So you see how Julie has like a little popup window on the bottom. This is the Caseta widget. So basically what it is, it’ll pop up every time someone visits your website, whether they’re an existing customer or a new, a new patient that you haven’t worked with yet. Um, and it, it prompts them to schedule and you can completely customize this, obviously, um, you know, putting your own, text, your own image, and then that will take, um, the potential client to the service menu. So that’s the screenshot you see on the left. So this is, these are Julie’s services. Again, completely customizable. You put in your own services, you can put a little descriptions, you can choose an image.
And then once the, the customer, the, or the patient chooses the relevant service, it’ll take them to this calendar, which is a smart calendar. So you have to set up this calendar. So it knows when you’re available or when your staff members all are available and you can have different availabilities for different services. So it’s all customizable. You can set everything up. It’s also, it’ll adjust itself to the time zone. If you’re working with different time zones and all your patient has to do is just find the time slot that works for them and book their next visit. That’s awesome. That is awesome. So how would you suggest that the doctors improve their patient loyalty? That’s that’s a big question because, you know, in times like these, we really want to be able to sort of secure our revenues, moving forward and have a clear understanding of, I mean, you know, half of 2020 has gone by, but there’s still pretty much half of it ahead of us.
And we’re really want to try and get an understanding of what that year is going to look like. You know, what the revenue cashflow situation is going to look like and curating care plans is something that can really help, you know? So when you have someone that comes in and I know Julie, I know you do this all the time, I’ve heard you talk about it. When you have someone, you know, come into the clinic, you can try. And if they need, you know, some sort of ongoing care, you know, instead of just saying like, okay, you know, you need to come in for adeno, whatever, four weeks, twice a week or three weeks, once a week, instead of just like kind of leaving that up in the air, you can say, come let’s, let’s take a minute to schedule your next visit. And you actually open the calendar or have them open the calendar from their phone. They view there, but your availability. And then that way everything is set up in your calendar. So, you know, if you have to, if they get, if they have to get like their nails done or their hair done, or do anything else, they already have your appointment in the calendar. That’s not going anywhere. They’ll schedule their whole lives around that.
Yeah. I absolutely loved that. So we call it advanced multiple scheduling. So we always ask them, you know, what days work best for you? Oh, Tuesdays and Thursdays, we do like morning or afternoon morning. Okay. Early morning or later morning. Later morning. Okay, great. We’ll schedule you at, you know, 10 30 Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next four weeks or whatever their care plan is. And that automation in itself saves me so much time. And now I do have a part time staff person. And so when that person comes in, they get their reminders. We don’t have to say, Oh, let’s schedule your appointment or you missed your appointment. And I love what you said is yeah. We become the most important thing in their schedule because it’s all set up and they getting their nails done and picking up the dog from the groomer that comes around our appointment.
Exactly. Yeah. There’s also, we also have, um, in the Cedar, there’s a new feature. We’re just about to launch in a couple of weeks. I know this. Isn’t not all clinics can use this, but it’s a, it’s basically a booking, um, a package booking feature. So you can do the thing where you schedule, you know, each visit individually. Um, you can also, if this applies to you, you can also pre-sell visits. So you can sell a package of visits and say, I don’t know, like if you do massage therapy, you can say, um, come and book 10 massages, pay for eight. And you know, you get this discount you pay upfront. And then, um, the patient can come in into, into the system and book their next visit. Anytime they like, and the system will recognize them because there’s a login process. So instead of asking them to pay every time, it’ll recognize the package credits and then just automatically, um, kind of like click re reduce brim, deduct a credit from the package. So this is something that we’re really excited about. I think a lot of clinics can really get great use out of it and it’s going live in a couple of weeks or so
I am so excited that I did not know about that. That is a big surprise for me. And I am so excited because we do have massage packages in our office. And it is a pain that we’re recording the manually. Like when, when did they come in? When do they pay? Oh my gosh, that will be awesome. Automation.
I think customers are going to love it because you know, it takes away from that annoying kind of tedious process of, okay, every time I have to come and pay in the end, it does boost loyalty. And cause you know, clients are invested in your, in your clinic. They’re invested in your business this way. Once they have these prepaid sessions, even if you do have to, uh, you know, eventually shut down for a couple of weeks or you have to move things around, you know, that these people aren’t going anywhere because they’ve already invested in your business and they will be back the day you reopened.
Absolutely. And you know, when they come in, we don’t want them thinking about payment, payment, payment, every time we want them to think about their health and their care they’re getting.
And so having that so they don’t have to touch it is wonderful. Yeah. I actually, I grabbed a couple of screenshots. This is just like an illustration of what it will look like. You know, the kids. So it’s, this is, this is actually just a yoga example, but it’s basically, you know, instead of booking the one yoga class, you can use book like a yoga package. And then just another idea for maybe some of you were where you’re looking for other ways to sort of stay in touch with customers or with patients that you haven’t been in touch with for awhile, you can use, you can use Wisetta or, or any other email automation tool to send these greetings. You know, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter so much what tools you use. As long as you get this stuff done, you should really use it on email platform that gives you inspiration and helps you stay in touch with people.
So, you know, even if they’re not coming into the clinic, you can still send out an email that says, you know, Hey everybody, I hope you guys are safe. I see this, I saw this interesting article, um, and I thought you’d really benefit from it. Or here are five ways, five great tips for saying, stay at home or, or, or dieting at home or working out at home or really anything, you know, that’s wellness and fitness related. These are just some examples. These are actually, um, like preset templates on buseta. So if you create a vc.com, you will already have these in your account and you can of course customize them and make them your own. But it’s just some good inspiration to give you the ideas. But I love that. I love that we sent out quite a few cause we did webinars health webinars for our patients all through our shutdown for COVID and the patients were able to interact and talk with me on there, but we send out emails to everybody and we had a really, really good response on that.
So even start to have an online presence for your practice, that’s a really great question. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of like, everyone’s talking about, you know, Oh, you have to move your business online. You have to do this online, that online. And it’s actually, you know, not so clear what that actually means. It’s like you wake up in the morning and you take your business online, you take your clinic online. What does that, like, what does that even look like? What is the first step? Um, and I have to say like over the last couple of months, I have been in touch with so many doctors or, or professionals like within the wellness space that have, step-by-step made this remarkable transition where they took their customer base, they took their existing service and found a way to pivot that into an online environment so they can continue seeing patients in the clinic, but also have this, you know, kind of, um, side stream of revenue where they’re seeing patients online.
And this is great, you know, for, for a couple of reasons, you know, you can see people that maybe are worried about going out of the house. You can, you know, it’s very, it’s, it’s, um, it’s very efficient. So instead of having people, you know, waiting around for, in your living room, in your, in, not in your living room, hopefully, but in your waiting room, um, you know, they’re all, each one of them has their own little zoom appointment. They know exactly what time they have to log on, you know, and then you can give them like a remote consultation. Um, I’ve been seeing this work really, really well for, um, you know, different types of professionals and for doctors specifically, um, the first, the first thing you really do need to do is be able to, um, you know, enable your customers to make these online bookings.
So you have to find a flow, find an experience that works for them to help them understand, you know, what kind of services they’re going to be, um, you know, consuming online, give them an easy way to book that service book there and see your availability and then hopefully even pay for that service online and then get a link, a zoom link. So when the time comes, it’s literally a click, they can connect from anywhere. Um, you can be in your clinic, you can be at home. So just again, that’s like you have to, when you, what if you’re trying to think of, you know, how you can set up your online practice, you really need a way to put your services online. So people understand what you’re, what it is you’re selling, what they’re going to get, make it easy for them to schedule.
So they understand, you know, when they, they can find a slot that works for them, make it, make a payment option available so they can pay up front. So you don’t have to start dealing with payments when you have a person online and of course give them clear instructions. So you want to say, you know, okay, at five o’clock tomorrow, you know, here’s your zoom link, we’re going to connect via zoom. Um, and actually, you know, in, in the VCITA, we’ve done, we’ve done this zoom integration. So when, when you use the scheduling flow that I showed you just a bit earlier at the envy, the patient will get an email that looks like this. So it’s like, okay, you know, you’re registered, this is your appointment. This is when it is, this is the zoom link. You know, you can add it to your calendar.
You can add a personal note. So this really gives, gives your, um, this gives your patients everything. They need to start consuming your services online. And it’s a good, it’s a good investment to make now because, you know, I mean, I really hope this will be over soon, but we don’t. The reality is we just don’t know. And depending on where you are for many of us, the winter is still ahead of us. So it’s a good time now to invest in these infrastructures that that’ll help you, um, you know, move some of your services online now and possibly all of them online, um, in the future.
No, absolutely. So when, when I got shut down, I up, so that’s when I started doing all of this and I started doing tele-health with the patients through zoom, sending them the reminders, just like this, and it worked out so, so well. And now that I’m back in the office, I’m able to do adjustments on patients. I’m able to do exams and, and therapies, you know, the hands on stuff, but we do a lot of functional medicine. And so all of our report of findings for the labs, we are still doing through telehealth because I don’t want to be, you know, in one little room and the patient doesn’t want to be in one little room going over paperwork so I can share their screen. And I want the train them that there are other ways to see me. And there’s other ways to come in contact with me because we don’t know what the future holds and they shut us down.
I’m I’m near Chicago. So we’ve been shut down quite a bit. Um, I want them to already be trained that they don’t lose their chance to have consultations with me just because it got shut down and they’ll already know it because they’ve experienced at tele-health. And I’ve had a lot of comments from going over the labs with patients. They’re like, wow, we really liked doing this tele-health because it, it feels like, you know, that screens right in front of them, they can have their spouse, you know, in on the consultation where a lot of times they couldn’t come in with. Um, so it’s been really, really awesome and we’re kind of training them for whatever, whatever the future holds we’re going to be prepared.
Yeah. And I think I just want to add something that I actually heard about yesterday. You know, I’ve, I’ve been speaking to some doctors that were a little bit concerned about their clientele and how they may adapt into this online environment. So guys, I just have to tell you this story the other day, I was trying to connect to a zoom call for work. And my mom who is not, I’m sorry, mom, if you’re watching this, I hope you’re not, but he is not. I love you, but she’s not a technical person at all. Like, she’s exactly the type of patient that I’d be concerned about and say, Oh man, like, I don’t know if she’s going to be able to walk onto this zoom. Like the way I know her, she’ll probably end up, like, I don’t know, posting something on my own Facebook page.
And I was near, I was, you know, struggling to connect to zoom and suddenly she swoops in grabs my phone. She’s like, no, no, no, you have to set this up. You know, you, you push the wrong button and she’s showing me how to connect to zoom. So I guess if there’s also something that has happened in these times is like some audiences that you would not expect to be. So tech savvy and easy to adapt to an online environment are actually really able to bridge that gap and, you know, kind of pivot into this online sphere.
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So if doctors want to learn more about the VCITA, how can they learn more about what you guys do is I think that’s super, super important.
Sure. So first of all, you’re welcome to hop onto our website. [inaudible] dot com. You can take a look around if you want to learn anything more about features. We have a 14 day free trial. You don’t even need to enter your credit card. You just put in, you know, your email address and start setting up your account. So you can open a free account, you know, start looking around, get a better understanding of how it can work and what kind of value it can bring to your business. And if you would like to hop on a call with one of our, um, product specialists, we give free demos. So if you want a demo, if you want a demo with one of our representatives, again, no commitment, no credit card. It’s just a phone call for you to try and understand if this is something that can work for you and trying to understand how the VCITA can bring value to your business. Um, so you can, first of all, I can do that on our website, but what I recommend is you just write the word demo in the comments and put your email address there. And someone from the CDL will reach out and schedule a demo with you.
That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Rachel. I think that we all got really good ideas, do level things that we can do to try to keep our practice going and having diverse to reach everybody. So it’s been great. And so thank you everybody for joining us for empowering women with ChiroSecure, let’s make sure we give them lots of thumbs up and hearts and, and be sure to tune in in two weeks where Dr. Nathalie Beauchamp will be our host for empowering women. So have a great day everybody. Bye bye. Thank you everybody. Goodbye.
Join us each week as we bring you the best in business growth, practice management, social media, marketing, networking, leadership, and moms more. If it’s about women in practice and business, you’ll hear it here. We hope you enjoy this week’s Facebook live event. Please like us on Facebook comment and share. We look forward to seeing all of you next week for another episode of empowering women in chiropractic. Now go ahead and hit the share button and tell your friends and colleagues about the show. Thank you for watching. Have a beautiful day. This has been a ChiroSecure production.
Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/Chirosecure) Follow us on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/chirosecure/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiropracticmalpracticeins/) Periscope (https://www.pscp.tv/ChiroSecure). Twitter (https://twitter.com/ChiroSecure) If you have any questions about today’s show or want to know why ChiroSecure is still the fastest growing malpractice carrier for over 27 years, then call us at (866) 802-4476. or find out just how much you can save with ChiroSecure by visiting: https://www.chirosecure.com/quick-quotes/malpractice-quick-quote/.