Face to Face with PetsApp founder Thom Jenkins

Q. Hi Thom, could you tell us the PetsApp story?

A. PetsApp is a client communication tool for veterinary clinics, helping to augment the patient advocacy efforts of teams while making things easier for them and pet owners.

I founded PetsApp to resolve the very real pain points I had experienced as a veterinarian, practice operator and pet owner. And we have iterated against that based on the feedback of the thousands of veterinary professionals and more than a million pet owners who now use PetsApp across more than 550 veterinary clinics.

A trip to the vet is often seen as an effort for pet owners. This has left veterinary care vulnerable to disruption by direct-to-consumer digital offerings – the type of companies that like to pretend you can upload a pet to the “cloud”. Veterinary clinics are perfectly placed to layer on more convenient digital touchpoints – providing the sort of joined-up, online-to-offline experience that is incredibly hard to compete with. PetsApp was founded to help clinics grasp exactly this opportunity.

Q. How does PetsApp help veterinary teams?

A. PetsApp has been found to save veterinary teams three hours every single day, including by eliminating games of telephone tennis with owners, and reducing missed calls by a whopping 85%. PetsApp has also been shown to boost wellness plan uptake by 35%.

PetsApp allows the team to prioritise calls at a glance, and gives them more control over when and how they respond.

Being able to use the team member app to ping across a quick photo of a patient to the owner once their pet has recovered from a procedure has proven incredibly popular. Asynchronous video discharges can also free up peak time consultation slots. Doing postop checks remotely with a simple photo sent on a chat, and only seeing back the ones that need to come in, has been helpful, too.

Q. Could you outline some of the core functions within the platform?

A. The two-way text chat, which can be done via SMS, the app, the web portal or the web widget. You can communicate with 100% of your client base from day one, while gradually deepening their engagement with your digital ecosystem.

Template messages, attachments, video calling, payments and the ability to collaborate on chats with your colleagues via the “hand-off” feature all make interacting via PetsApp the preferred method for receptionists, RVNs, veterinarians and pet owners.

Reminders help ensure pets get the benefit of veterinary recommendations. These are done via push notifications, SMS, email and postcard. We do appointment, vaccine and parasiticide reminders incredibly well, but also go beyond to include digital nudges for things like dental recommendations, wellness plans and postop checks. The richness of the call to action tied to these reminders on PetsApp is what many clinics and pet owners love most.

Creating different types of subscription options for pet owners on PetsApp works particularly well for wellness plans, but also things like prescription diet subscriptions. Addition of home delivery makes this particularly compelling.

Q. AI CoPilot has launched – how does it work?

A. The feedback is it is like magic. PetsApp Co-pilot uses state-of-the-art AI to generate a suggested response to any pet owner message. The response will be personalised to the pet and owner, but without any personally identifiable information being surfaced to third parties, which is super important. It is then up to a team member whether to use that response or make edits.

Q. How does AI CoPilot help augment human connection and expertise?

A. For a busy team it is another tool in their patient advocacy toolkit. It is certainly no replacement for the expertise of a veterinary professional, but can help with wording things and, perhaps counter-intuitively, has been shown to be good at adding the empathetic finesse that sometimes gets lost when we are super busy and rushing to respond.

It’s amazing the difference even something as subtle as a paw print emoji can make to how a message is received by an owner, and PetsApp Co-pilot has the veterinary team’s back on that sort of thing. Sometimes we would like to ask a colleague “what would you say here?” Or “how would you respond to this?” PetsApp Co-pilot provides that at the click of a button.