FAQ

We’re a veterinary triage, client service, and customer communications platform that empowers your practice to meet your patient’s needs 24/7. Whether it’s daytime overflow support, after-hours triage, or digital tools to communicate with your clients via chat and telemedicine, GuardianVets is here to serve your practice.

Absolutely! First, an alliance with the GV triage team drastically reduces the amount of time that your on-call DVMs spend on emergencies by ensuring they only get contacted for truly emergent conditions. Better work-life balance, less burnout.

After-hours triage helps your clients avoid unnecessary trips to the ER and gives them the peace of mind they need in a 2 a.m. crisis. It’s top-quality support when they need it most, which strengthens their loyalty to your clinic and reinforces your position as the most trusted authority for animal care concerns.

Finally, it keeps clients in-house and in-network. Avoiding unneeded trips to the ER allows for continuity of care and increases your revenue.

No. We follow VCPR strictly and help the pet owner to understand the level of urgency of the situation without providing diagnosis or treatment. Our goal is always to support the relationship between DVM and patient.

It’s easier to list the kinds that we don’t partner with! GV doesn’t work with production animal, and we are more limited when it comes to equine and mobile practices due to their unique scheduling needs.

If you fall into one of these categories and aren’t sure how we might work together- reach out! We’d love to talk and see if we’re a match.

There are three major ways that GuardianVets can improve your practice:
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1. Cutting-Edge Efficiency: Our tech suite and credentialed veterinary professionals streamline today’s unprecedented demand for care so you can focus on the patients within your walls. With the phone no longer ringing nonstop, your staff can pour their energy–distraction-free–into excellent care and revenue generation. Meanwhile, you can avoid the pitfalls of constantly hiring from among a dwindling workforce to keep up with demand.

2. Better Communication: Missed calls add up to lost revenue. Unnecessary visits to the ER are costly for clients and a distraction for busy hospitals. GV improves communications top-to-bottom, and the results are better for everyone involved.

3. Excellent Service: Our certified veterinary technicians are experts. That means we can offer top-quality triage support when a pet is in crisis and owners feel the difference. We improve client relationships, the reputation of your clinic, and your ability to deliver quality care.

GuardianVets provides an all-encompassing digital communication platform through three tiers of service.
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1. We offer teletriage with our credentialed veterinary technicians and DVMs to serve a practice’s client base after hours.
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2. We provide a telemedicine platform for practice DVMs to communicate directly with their clients through text and/or video.
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3. Finally, we offer two-way chat, which is a central communications hub that allows CSRs and other office personnel to communicate with your clients during the day.

We provide a gold-standard team with extensive veterinary experience, and we’ve built our operations to free up your team to focus on providing medicine.

Answering services can take your calls, but are extremely limited in what they can offer past that point. Some services will provide a dedicated virtual staff person to your clinic, but you’ll still need to train and manage them, and they’ll still need to call out and take days off.

GuardianVets has a large, diffused team, which means that we can bring an expert veterinary team to support your practice, 24/7. We bring a level of experience that’s genuinely unmatched in the industry, and our priority is always to support your clinic.

After signup, one of our onboarding specialists will call for the initial consultation. We’ll learn your greeting preferences, where you’d like to direct actual emergencies, any deviations from your normal hours, etc. We’ll also ask you to send us your logo so we can start customizing your outreach program to your clients. We prefer to do onboarding over the phone so that you can ask any last questions before going live.

Once you’re onboarded, we’ll mail you customized postcards that you can distribute. We’ll also coordinate all your social media and email notifications and ensure that your phone lines are properly set up. If you’d like, we can provide a custom video-on-demand application for client communication. Regardless, you’ll have access to an administrative dashboard where you can view key statistics such as: who called, when they called, what they called for, and how many appointment requests were generated.

When a triage team member answers a call, they identify themselves and confirm that they’re answering for your hospital. The medical inquiry is then triaged using a systematic, comprehensive questionnaire, thus determining whether the issue is emergent or non-emergent. Then, our credentialed veterinary technician will direct your patient to the appropriate service based on your protocols.

First, we’re incredibly proud of our team and only hire and retain the highest quality credentialed veterinary professionals. If you’re interested in our services and would like to learn more about our team or speak directly with one of our DVMs, please let us know!

Second, we work from intensely researched, evidence-based protocols and clinical guidelines to assist our team members during the triage process. We’ve put in the time so we can provide the highest level of service.

Last but not least, we’re in consistent contact with regulatory bodies so we can stay on the cutting edge of industry-best practices.

No. We have carefully worked with our legal team and various regulatory bodies to make sure that our teletriage services do not establish any VCPR. Our doctors and credentialed veterinary technicians do not in any way provide diagnoses nor are we a substitute for a physical examination. Our triage team does not provide a prognosis or prescribe medications. To be clear, our teletriage team DOES NOT provide telemedicine. Instead, we provide triage support, assist owners in determining emergent versus non-emergent concerns, and assist with scheduling appointments with the practice the following day.

Yes! All calls are recorded and the audio is made available to you. Every triage consultation is documented via email as well and sent to designated email addresses as soon as the call concludes.

We’ve spent years building up a highly experienced team of CSRs and CVTs. We look for multiple years of experience in the veterinary world, and candidates applying to our triage team need 3-5 years minimum ER experience. New hires go through extensive training before taking a single call and are shadowed on their early shifts. No matter a team member’s level of experience, every call is recorded, and we do regular call reviews to maintain the best possible experience for your clients.

Hiring is hard! It’s a struggle to find qualified applicants in the first place, and those that can hire often struggle with high turnover rates. It’s an expensive process with lots of hidden costs- especially in training.

GV provides support that’s never late, never calls out, and is available 24/7. We ingest your protocols and can follow your hospital’s SOP’s without needing training from your team. We’re a supplement to your existing staff that saves you time and money while maintaining a consistent experience for your clients.

We like to say that the veterinary industry is as much a human business as it is a pet business. GuardianVets can’t replace someone interacting face-to-face with your clients and their pets. Instead, we give your team the space to focus on those interactions and the other day-to-day operations of your clinic.

Think of us as a supplement, rather than a substitute. We make your entire hospital more focused, efficient, and friendly so everyone can go home on time.

Fundamentally, a phone service can greet customers and send the call back to you. They can potentially screen some unnecessary calls, but they can’t triage, assess the situation, or schedule according to your protocols.

GuardianVets is a true extension of your team, providing a level of support that can only come from experienced CSRs and CVTs. We follow your protocols while providing top notch service and cutting back your workload.

Our staffing model is spread across multiple time zones and includes shifts throughout the day and night. That means that someone is always available for your clients, with layers of redundancy so we never miss a call.

In short: our staffing model is more efficient, and avoids issues like callouts leaving a shift understaffed.

It’s rooted in our technology. We ingest and organize your hospital’s protocols, then create an easy format for our CSRs and CVTs to follow within the software.

Every time a call comes through to our team, they’re given a set of steps to follow, which allows them to focus on providing great service while replicating the experience that a client would have interacting with your clinic.

Compassion, empathy, and customer service are universal, and our team excels in those areas. We provide a steady voice to guide your clients through thick and thin.

Working with GuardianVets gives you the space to prioritize the experience of clients and patients in-clinic. Your team will be amazed at how much time and energy they gain back to focus on face-to-face interactions, and your clients will feel the difference.

The good news is that you don’t have to be! Our software is simple to use and we prioritize user-friendly design in every update. Whenever you do have concerns, our team is here to help and we also offer a library of useful resources!

More broadly, finding ways to blend technology into your processes is the way of the future. Hiring isn’t a viable solution for the vast majority of veterinary hospitals, especially as demand grows for 24-hour support. It’s vital to find ways to augment your staff without burning out, and the best way to do that is by using the new tools available to you.

First: consumer-oriented triage services offer a terrible customer experience. Your clients have to pay exorbitant prices to find out if they even need care.

These services also have no relationship with your clinic, meaning that they aren’t able to schedule non-emergent cases back as appointments. The records from these cases aren’t automatically added to the patient’s medical record, which leaves you in the dark.

More broadly, GV is committed to providing continuity of care for your patients. We offer 24/7 support through your clinic, creating great experiences, even in the scariest moments, and centralizing care in-house.

First, we send a questionnaire that allows us to understand your protocols and the basic workings of your clinic. We upload that information into our software to build out a clear set of steps that our team can follow on every call.

From there, we’ll schedule a meeting to check all of the information and get you and your team comfortable with the portal. We’ll cover your phones during that call, and we’ll send over marketing materials so you can let your customers know about the new services you’re offering!

During onboarding, you’ll meet your customer support manager- your first point of contact for all things GV. On top of that existing relationship, you can connect with our broader support team at support@guardianvets.com or submit a support ticket.

We’re always close by, with a team of people dedicated to keeping your operations running as seamlessly as possible.