RingCental Online spoke with Dave Grisowitz, Hospital Administrator of the New York City Veterinary Specialists, a 24-hour emergency hospital for pets.
Your RingCentral account is set up so that veterinarians connect to your facility for after-hour emergencies, thereby making their clients your clients. How many clinics are on your account and from a business perspective, how does it benefit you?
DG: We have 15 clinics signed up now and we're signing up more every week. If a clinic has a 10,000 person caseload, and on any given week somebody has an emergency, we, of course, want that emergency to come to us rather than to another emergency hospital...Of course, from a business perspective it's great for us to get the business.
So veterinary clinics point after-hours calls to their RingCentral number, and you get the calls. Can you tell us how you've set up your system?
DG: What we've done is we've set up RingCentral where we're a master account with sub-accounts [the veterinary clinics]. We've assigned the sub-accounts with their own number, generally a toll-free number. In an emergency, the first thing people will do is call their Vet, and of course their Vet is closed, but what plays is a customized message that'll say "Thank you for calling ABC Animal Hospital, we're closed, if this is an emergency please press 1 and you'll be connected to NYC Veterinary Specialists." And they connect to us, and that's our benefit.
What makes this interesting for your clients, the veterinarians?
DG: What's nice is that the service can play different announcements at different times of the day. A new message automatically plays once a doctor is no longer on call. For example, if the doctor is on call, callers might hear "you've reached Dr. Smith, please leave me a message," and then the system will send a text-message alert to the doctor's pager or cell phone. Or if they are no longer on call, the message will say, "You've reached us after-hours, please press 1, and you'll be connected to NYC Veterinary Specialists." The service gives callers a lot of options for reaching emergency and non-emergency personnel, or the doctor's direct cell phone.
And do the clinics like it? What's their response?
DG: Everyone's been really happy with it and not one person who has signed up for the service backed off of it. They get all of these nice features and in return we get their emergency business. We're using quite a few minutes these days, it's increasing every month.
You don't charge them for this service?
DG: No, because one emergency visit can be from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars.
What else?
DG: It also solves a problem for them. They don't have to worry about who's going to take their clients because we have a relationship with them.
And they can also save money by eliminating their answering services.
DG: The flexibility of the RingCentral system let's them get rid of their answering service, get rid of their calling service and get rid of a number of things that they're using for after-hours phone handling. 
Veterinarians use different answering systems and most of them are not at all advanced. Some have an answering machine announcing that they're closed and provide the name and number of an emergency hospital, some have a live answering service that'll page them and they used to pay something like $300 to $400 for it.
What do you appreciate the most?
It's a great system for us. The nice part is it's customizable, so someone will be text-paged when there's an urgent message. Doctors can access messages by the telephone or online, so all of those things are great.
Generally, in almost all cases, their RingCentral account is more advanced than what they were doing because they can access it from the internet, and they have all kinds of cool ways of receiving calls and messages.
Answering services can help your business deliver a high level of customer satisfaction and will be a fantastic asset in keeping your client's calls in check as you focus on your business.
Posted by: Small Business Answering service | June 10, 2010 at 06:28 PM