Parking Lot Strategies: Streamlining Arrival and Reducing Stress at Your Clinic
Your obligation to your clients begins the moment they arrive in your parking lot. This is also is where your liability begins. If something happens to a pet or a person in your parking lot, it’s your responsibility. It’s critically important to manage your parking lot.
The risks you are trying to mitigate include:
- Bites
- Flights
- Fights
- Disease Transmission
The best strategy for check in, is to check them in the parking lot
You can use e-Lobby curbside to check them in. How exactly depends on the configuration of your parking lot.
Parking lots come in all shapes and sizes
Here are the three types of parking lots: circular drive, parking spaces, no parking lot. No matter what type of parking lot you have, checking them in the lot is better any day of the week than bringing them into the lobby. It’s faster, safer and less stressful for all if you allow your clients to use their car as a container. Later in this section we give you concrete strategies depending on your parking lot type.
Other handy things to have curbside
- A shade tent
- A mister if it’s hot, Home Depot has good, battery operated misters
- Leashes
- Cheeze Whiz
- Blank setups
- Extra neck collars
- Extra pre-torn masking tape
- Pens, sharpies, highlighters
- Sticky notes (to flag caution dogs with putting on the windshield)
- Dog bags
- Pepper spray (in case of dog attacks)
- Cat carriers
- Muzzles, all sizes
- Surface go tablets (two)
- Wifi hot spot
- Table
- Duck tape (name tags)
- Neon vests for staff to wear
- Parking cones to lay out a clear path
- Paperwork binder with packets
Preventing issues
Trucks with animals in the back: Pick up trucks with pets in the back should be leap frogged to the front of the line. This mitigates the risk of pets jumping out the back of the truck. Note: If dogs are in the back of the truck and tied into the sides of the truck, it’s important to not let the dogs jump out and accidentally hang themselves.
Cats loose in cars: It’s important to have extra carriers out front and quickly give to the owners to get the cats in.
Rolled down windows: Ask each owner to roll up their windows to prevent pets jumping out of cars.
Reduce trigger stacking
- When thinking about how to get dogs from cars to exam, it’s very important to have the shortest path from the car to the door.
- Staff should greet owners with a smile and let their dogs see that. Research has proven that dogs are easier to handle when they see staff positively interacting with their owner.
- Staff should briefly smile at pets but not pet them or try to engage them until it’s time to unload. This is called reducing “trigger stacking.”
