Use your voicemail

You might think checking voice messages is a pain. But Mark Opperman, CVPM, Veterinary Economics Hospital Management Editor, points out these five pluses to using your voicemail to get the right messages to the right people in a timely manner:

1. Doctors get messages in their entirety—not just fragments—so they have more information before they contact the client.

2. It's inexpensive to set up.

3. You can set up separate voicemail boxes for technicians, prescriptions, and each doctor so that messages are quickly and neatly distributed to the appropriate person without getting lost.

4. It's more efficient for receptionists to send clients to voicemail than to transcribe messages. And written messages are more likely to get lost and misplaced.

5. Written messages don't carry the voice inflection that lets you know whether the client is happy, calm, upset, or frantic.