702: Stop Typing the Same Thing Twice
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How do you communicate clearly when you are tired, frustrated, or emotionally depleted? In this episode, we talk about why templates and saved scripts are not robotic shortcuts, but tools that help us protect our voice, our policies, and our peace. We share how repeated questions about cancelations, pricing, onboarding, hiring, birthdays, reviews, and training can drain a business owner when every response has to be written from scratch. We also explain why consistent communication is a brand issue, a team culture issue, and a sustainability issue. By creating templates ahead of time, we can reduce decision fatigue while still showing up with warmth, professionalism, and good judgment.
Main topics:
Templates reduce decision fatigue
Consistent client communication matters
Brand voice beyond owners
Scripts support team training
Systems protect emotional energy
Main takeaway: “Copy, paste, change the name, and you’re done, and you can actually go on to serve the next client, just like you want to be doing.”
A strong communication template is not about sounding robotic. It is about borrowing the clearest, calmest, most professional version of yourself when you are tired, overwhelmed, or emotionally depleted. When a client asks about a policy, your answer should not depend on whether it is 10 a.m. or 10 p.m. Templates help you protect your tone, enforce your boundaries, and communicate with consistency. They also give your team the language they need to represent your business well.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet Sitter Confessional, cancelation policy, emotional depletion, client communication, brand voice, templates, admin staff, training scripts, hiring pipeline, client onboarding, service FAQs, birthday messages, review requests, email platform, team culture.
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:02
We recently had a 10 hour day. We were exhausted, and then a client messaged us about our cancelation policy. I wanted to pull my hair out. We were staring at our phone, trying to figure out how to word it again. We didn't want to be too harsh, not too apologetic, firm, but warm. And also, we realized we've written this thing 47 different times to 47 different clients, and we were tired of it. So, what did we do? How do we figure out how to say that thing again the exact same way? Hi, I'm Megan.
Collin 00:32
I'm Collin.
Meghan 00:33
We are the host of Pet Sitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. We appreciate you being here with us today. We'd also like to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and Pet Perennials. There are many dog walkers and pet sitters just like you that listen to these podcast episodes, and if you have found value in the show, we would love it if you would go to Pet Sitter confessional.com/support to help us out with the crafting of that cancelation policy. We realize that consistent communication is hard,
Collin 01:00
very,
Meghan 01:00
when you have hundreds of clients, you want to present a front, the same front every time. How do you do that? The problem with that is that pet care is emotional work. Every interaction carries weight. We're dealing with living beings. Maybe it's the new client who's nervous about leaving their dog for the first time, or the new employee who made a mistake and thinks that you're going to fire them because they couldn't remember the one thing that they needed to remember, or the client who's upset about a cancelation charge. We have certainly had that many times over the years.
Collin 01:31
It turns out that dealing with people means dealing with emotions, emotions of fear, worry, anxiety, anger, frustrations, nervousness, both for our clients and our employees, and even us, all of that is tied together in this, and when we're emotionally depleted, because we do get to that point, we do get to the point where we just can't give another care to something, because of those long days, because I've had to care so much about a million other things that day, the last when we reach that point, the last thing that we want to do is sit down and carefully and purposefully construct the conversation right,
Meghan 02:09
because a lot of times we don't have any words left. Right at 10 in the morning, I have lots of words in my vocabulary, and by the end of the day, I am so emotionally depleted, I have about four left in me, so either we avoid the conversation entirely, or we send something that's too casual and not firm enough, and we kind of say, oh, it's okay this time, and you know, we'll get it next time, not a big deal, and or we over explain, and we walk back our own policies, we don't want to be doing that either, because why have the policies if we're not actually going to stick to them,
Collin 02:41
and the way this typically shows up, like you said, Megan, is in the morning you're able to send three or four sentences in response to somebody with a single question, and then by the end of the day you're basically saying no, like what's your cancelation policy, you don't get refunded. Period. In the morning, you may have said, well, because we carefully time out and blah blah blah blah, and all the admin work that goes to this, and paying the employees well, and making sure that we are confident, and but that means that you're not consistent with how you handled that at all, and that inconsistency means that clients get different answers depending on who they're talking to, as in, are they talking to morning you or evening you, depleted you, or full you, and what mood you're in, and whether it's week one or 47 of the year, we aren't the same person day to day, even though we may feel like it.
Meghan 03:28
We talked last week on episode 700 about when fires stack back to back, and how in the middle we don't have time to come down from them, and then if a client messages you after you've dealt with some fires, you just, you don't have the capacity in your brain to really formulate a thoughtful comment. When you have a team of employees, the stakes get even higher. It's not just you, it's now you're having to answer for your team and what they do, and things that they have done or not done at visits. The inconsistency there doesn't only affect your own relationships with clients, but your relationship with your employees and their relationship to the clients. The moment you add admin staff, as well, or management staff, the problem multiplies even further, because your admin is not you. What are they trained? Did you train them well enough to answer questions appropriately, not be too brash, not be too wishy-washy, but be firm, kindly. They don't know your instincts, sometimes your voice, your philosophy, the thing that you've crafted over years and years of doing visits and meeting with clients and answering hundreds of client questions. Do they know? Do you have a specific SOP for how they handle these things,
Collin 04:41
and just that experience of being able to read into tone. I mean, there are many times where somebody may ask me the same question, but they have a different tone, and I know that means that they're skeptical, or maybe that means that they're actually excited about how I'm going to answer this, and that comes with experience and understanding of that. Interaction that I've had 1000s of times. Does our admin staff have that? Have I trained them to look for that, to understand that? And then, depending on which one, will they choose the right thing? Right, clients should always feel like they're talking to the same business, and that's the tricky part here. When we add the admin staff, when we add the field staff, when we do that, suddenly each conversation that your client has with your business, your client expects it to be the same, to have the same answers, the same intonation, the same voice, the same outcome, should have that, regardless of who's responding.
Meghan 05:33
Now, this is a little different when we talk about visit reports, when we're doing the dog walks and the pet sits, we do want to have people have their own personality, you know. Obviously, there are things that are non-starters that we have to have in reports, but people have a lot more, have a lot more leeway, and can show their personality a lot more in visit reports than they can really answering questions of, well, is it going to be the same walker every time? What is your policy on keys? You know, specific policy questions or specific client onboarding questions that can't really vary from person to person. The company has to have one voice,
Collin 06:08
yeah, one brand voice, right? It's a brand issue, not a communication issue. And here's an example that comes up all the time. People may ask us, Do you provide overnight services? Well, I know how we will answer that. Megan and I do. Does my admin know how we're going to answer? What's my starting point with that question? Because there is a way to just come out and say no, we don't, and stop talking. Right, that is one way to answer it. It's another way to say over the years we've found, and then go into more of an explanation for that gives credence and credibility to what you are doing, and those different approaches really are all about the brand voice that you're trying to get across.
Meghan 06:47
We talked about dealing with emotions here with clients, but there's an emotional trap that we can fall into as well, such as the fear of enforcing policies. We think I don't want them to think that I'm just in it for the money, that I'm greedy, that I'm all I want is to just hoard money over here and take their money and not actually provide a good service,
Collin 07:05
which is definitely hard, because we love what we do. Many of us say, oh, I do this even if I didn't get paid, but I do need to protect myself, and I do need this money to pay for my food and my house and for the things that I need. This is the way I earn a living, and so when they cancel, or whenever they want to book last minute, or when they want to change something, if you have policies, and I've always said this, like, if you are going to put something in your policies, in your, you know, whatever you are having people sign, make sure that you are willing to enforce it,
Meghan 07:36
and if you aren't willing, then take it out, you can hit delete or erase very easily,
Collin 07:42
yeah. But we fall into that also with the fear of conflict, of well, I don't want them to get upset, so I'm just not going to say anything. Right, that message comes in at 10 o'clock, and they may say, you know, did the trash get taken out, or why didn't the trash get taken out? And you go, I don't.. well, I don't want to. How do I say this? How do I communicate this? I don't want them to be angry with me,
Meghan 08:01
and I don't want to start a fight at 11pm at night either.
Collin 08:04
Well, because we're fatigued, right? Right of the.. I'll just.. I'll just handle this, you know, and deal with it later, or I'll do this, do it next time, I'll figure this out some other time, and all of these things continue to trap us in not acting, not actually doing something, not changing. These are the natural result of running the kind of relationship-based businesses that we do, but without a system, that's the key here. When we talk about how do I communicate consistently, how do I make sure that my brand voice is perpetuated beyond me and able to accomplish the things? Well, I need to find a way to have the same kind of phrases, the same kind of communication saved somewhere. What if I had these, these templates, right, these templates of communication around certain topics that I encounter all the time? I need to build a better system, so that I don't get emotionally trapped and put myself in bad situations.
Meghan 09:01
Templates are very easy. They are a decision made in advance. It's all about the planning here. How can you make less decisions moving forward? And great way to do that is to have basically scripts that you say, okay, well, when somebody asks about a cancelation policy, this is what we say, and when somebody asks about our team approach or how we handle keys, we already have a script for what to say.
Collin 09:23
What you're doing is you're taking the best version of you. Okay, this is you when you are well rested, you are clear headed, you are intentional, you've eaten, you've had coffee, or whatever, right? You've sat down and you figure out exactly what you want to say. You do this one time, so you're capturing the best thought, the best version of you. Then, having these templates, having these scripts, what you're doing is you are borrowing that version of yourself when it's 11 o'clock at night on a Tuesday, or whenever it's 5:30am on a Wednesday, and you get that message when you're exhausted, when you just can't even, when you're. Fatigue, when all things are just tumbling around, or whatever. Maybe you ought to hand this off to somebody else, so that they can pick this up.
Meghan 10:08
Yeah, we're talking about late nights and early mornings here. But even if you have office hours and you stick to those, well, you don't know what's going to happen during 10am on a Monday, during, you know, when you're supposed to be having your office hours and answering, doing admin things, but then all of a sudden you get some bad news personally, and that impacts you. So, it could even be 12 o'clock on a Wednesday, you're eating lunch, and this message comes in, and you're not okay, but you still need to have the same voice in front of your clients.
Collin 10:36
You just got a phone call your friends in the hospital. Oh, now your client's calling you because they want to cancel, and they have a question about the cancelation policy. How are you going to respond? And it's not about sounding robotic here, it's just about not having to reinvent the wheel every single time.
Meghan 10:52
Now, yes, you can use Chat GPT for some of these responses, as long as you've fed it your handbook and your policies and everything ahead of time. It can throw you back scripts, but you have to read these and make sure that it's in your own voice, how you would sound to your clients. Templates are easy, and so is getting insurance from Pet Sitters Associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, and Pet Sitters Associates is here to help. For over 25 years, Pet Sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting, or just starting out, they make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote at Petsit llc.com As a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use code confessional at checkout, that's Petsit llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care.
Collin 11:38
And so, what kind of areas do we use this, these safe scripts, these templated communication forms. In, we got a lot of different buckets that we've developed over the years,
Meghan 11:47
and these are going to vary based on you, your business, how your business is structured, what policies you have. But here's a good framework.
Collin 11:54
Yeah, so one of the first ones that we started to develop was just in our hiring pipeline, because we want to be able to communicate with a lot of people very quickly. If we put out one hiring ad, we may get 40, 5060, people that apply. Well, how do I make sure that they get the same instructions, the same message, the same tone, the same? How do I make sure that I don't forget to say certain things back to them? Well, we, Megan has developed save to text for every single step of the process. What do we say when we get the application received? Now with the phone screening invitation, now with the interview confirmation, now with the offer, the decline, and that's the what's one of the hardest ones, too. Okay, we've made it through a couple steps and now we're going to decline them. I don't want Megan doesn't want to be handcrafting and bespokely typing out where you're not going to be hired by
Meghan 12:48
us. Well, and that, that's
Collin 12:49
really face.
Meghan 12:50
Yeah, that was really dangerous, because you can get into, well, you weren't right the fit for for x reason, or you wanted too many hours, or you weren't available on the days that we needed, or we just start going down the list of kind of explaining why we didn't hire them or didn't go with them, and move them on to the next step, and we wanted to get rid of that completely. We just wanted a generic, you know,
Collin 13:13
boiler plate thing.
Meghan 13:13
Yeah, so they couldn't come back and be like, "Well, that's not fair, I had said blah blah blah, or "I'm willing to concede on blah blah blah, or I can't believe you thought I was serious about that. I was just kidding. No, we're not here to fight, we're not here to go back and forth. We just wanted one script and
Collin 13:29
done, or just our hiring onboarding as well. Of okay, once we've made them the offer letter, now we've got multiple steps that they have to do at different checkpoints and different things. What are those? I don't want to mistakenly mistype the time that I'm supposed to meet with them or what they need to bring for the I nine or any of that stuff, so have it saved so that when they reach that step, you can go, okay, at this point I need to copy, paste, change the name, and I need to move on.
Meghan 13:58
We also have templates for our service frequently asked questions. You have been in business for a while, you know the kind of clients questions that you get asked over and over again. What is your price? Where do you serve? What's your cancelation policy? How do I book? What's the next step? Clients ask the same general questions, so whether a client asks via a text or a Facebook message, or your website form, or a phone call, or at an event, you know what you're going to say. You're not typing a novel here, you're pulling from a template and personalizing it in 15 seconds or less.
Collin 14:33
Yep, that's what you do. You maybe somebody asks about overnights. Well, you can customize that with the person's name, the name of their dogs, or the cat, and the other information that they have given you to now make it seem like this was handcrafted to them, but all you did was pull it from somewhere, and it makes it so much easier too, because if you do get that message of explain this policy, and you know, oh my gosh, there's a lot that goes into this. Where do I start? How do I do this? I need to leave in five minutes to get something else taken care of. You're busy, you don't want to be spending time crafting that over and over again. It's one of the best things you can do. And if you already have an FAQ section on your website, and spoiler alert, you should have an FAQ section on your website, because AI is scraping that kind of information to surface when people ask it questions about your business, so have that now take that information and save it somewhere, and use that.
Meghan 15:28
We've talked about this one a lot, but also cancelation responses is a big one. People want to know, and when people don't know, and then they become angry, you can say, well, it was listed here, and here, and here, and here it is again. This template removes the emotion from the moment of execution. You have it in your contract, you have it in your software, you make them sign before they agree to service, you have it on the invoice, you've already decided how to handle it. Now you just apply it,
Collin 15:57
and that can also include what else you, you add to this, so it may be the written part, but maybe you also want to make sure you don't forget to include a screenshot of the cancelation policy that they have already signed, or the screenshot of the cancelation that you send along with the confirmation of services. These templates can also be wonderful in helping you give the four steps for how you are to handle this, whether that's okay. Step one is I need to remember to breathe and focus on this. Step two, go to this document to find it. Step three, copy and paste and personalize, and step four, include any other important documents. We also have saved scripts and templates for training our employees, especially around client care in those directions. This gives us consistent language for teaching our employees how to handle specific instructions and special instructions regarding medications, reactive dogs, or feeding routines. So we go through the basic introduction training for all of our employees. Then once they start doing visits on their own, periodically we have to step back in and train them specifically on a client or for specific skill. So one way that we've helped with this is before they walk into the cat client who needs sub q fluids twice a day, and we're going to show them how to do that. We're going to give them a set of written instructions for how we do this, tips and pointers beforehand, so they can review that, have that in mind, and then we show up and do that. This could even be for where to take a dog for their special long walks or the special services that we offer. Hey, before you do this, here's the specific information for how we want this done and what needs to happen that way, regardless of whether it's employee one or employee 45 we're sending them the exact same information, so everybody's on the same page.
Meghan 17:41
You also have to keep in mind that not every employee is going to learn the same way, so yes, a lot of our things are written instructions, but sometimes they're videos as well, because that showcases a lot better than just reading it can.
Collin 17:54
But it's taking that script that we wrote and then turning it into a video, and now it's standardized, it's templated for everybody who watches it.
Meghan 18:02
The very first template that we created was for birthday messages for our clients. These are warm, memorable on brand. They don't require a whole lot of inspiration every single time. They're kind of short, they're sweet, and all we have to do is just change the pet name and maybe a blue heart to a pink heart or whatever,
Collin 18:19
but it makes it so that it is workable for us now we can be consistent with sending birthday messages, where before we used to struggle with it, and it was, oh, okay, well, Who has a birthday today? What did we write last time? Let me go find that, and I think that's what really cued us into this of, oh, who was the client who we sent this kind of message to previously. Also, this happened to us a lot with lock boxes, when people would ask about our lockbox policy, okay? Who did we have? Who we just onboard? Who got a lock box? We sent this to before. Let me go copy that and paste it into this person. With birthdays, it was the same thing, and then it fell off our plate because we didn't want to do it, because it meant we have to write something, and it became a laborious thing that we did. Now it's not. We can change the name and send them off pretty quickly.
Meghan 19:02
Another one I like doing is asking for reviews, because who doesn't want some amazing things said about them? So, when we go to ask for a review, we do it in a kind way. We have the same script that we send every time, we'll change the pet names, but generally it's the same wording, the same tone, the same timing of the week, it's all decided in advance, so it actually gets sent,
Collin 19:25
and that's again the thing of sometimes you can get too busy, you're in a busy season, so you forget to send those requests for the reviews. Well, having it all pre-written out is just step one in that. Now you schedule it every day, every certain day of the week is your ask for review day, well, on my ask for review day, I go to where the script is saved, and I copy that, paste it in, change the names. It really is, you're literally turning your brain off. I think that's what's so helpful about this. You change the name, you hit send, and you're done. And, and that's not when I say you're turning your brain off, it's not being late. Easy, we're not being careless here. It's letting the systems do the thinking, letting the template, letting the script do the actual work. It's what allows you to send 250 300 clients without burning out emotionally every time these things come up.
Meghan 20:17
There's also something to be said for an email platform where you send out weekly emails, and then you don't have to bespokely say, okay, this one goes to Barbara and this one goes to Jim. It just sends 500 in one fell swoop, and you've only had to write one email.
Collin 20:32
Yep, if you want to remind people about upcoming blackout dates, or you have certain price increases, or it's going to be a busy period of time, or maybe you just want to brag about yourself, because cool stuff that you're doing, having that platform allows you to write once, send it, and then you can see who opens it. That just gets really powerful as well. But at its base, it just gives you that potential to be talking to so many people simultaneously.
Meghan 20:54
Well, and you talk about scripts, you can have the same in your email newsletter, you can have the same general concepts that you hit week over week, maybe it's a pet tip, maybe it's a policy reminder, maybe it's a hey, it's going to rain this week, so here's what, how we handle that. These scripts will really help you save time in all aspects of your business.
Collin 21:11
Well, and there is this boundary, there's this line between what we're talking about here to the all the way on the other, so there's the spectrum of not thing doing this and writing things bespokely, the middle ground of having some save script and templates, and then there's this full automation side of things, of you may be listening to this and thinking, well, why not just set up a full auto reply for all of this stuff, of having a CRM that captures all of this, knows what they're asking, and then sends back a reply, just kind of, you know, just copied and pasted verbatim. Well, think of it this way: automation works really well for those transactional moments when you have to send a message that confirms an appointment, right? They send a booking, it hits your email, your automation script grabs that, shoots back, and all it says is, thank you for the booking request. We've received it. We look forward to seeing your pet soon. Period. Okay, that's something you can send, or maybe just an automatic sending of invoices. That would, that's great. Having to manually send those can be annoying. Or maybe the scheduling reminders as a reminder, tomorrow you have a booking coming up, and we look forward to seeing them. Okay, that's one thing, but automation fails for relational moments when that new client who contacts you and says, I'm really worried about leaving my pets for the first time, I've only had my mom watch them before. Well, if you had an automatic script that just says great book, here you go, that's that's not going to go over too well, or maybe that team member sends you a message, and they're really struggling today, they've really had a hard day, they've had some health things or personal things going on, or maybe just the visits have just sucked, being perfectly honest, and they're not having a good day, and they message you, and then there's just again that cancelation conversation that comes up with a long-term client who's never canceled before, and now they want to know what that is. How you handle those personal, those human moments, that makes all the difference. The template isn't taking away the personalization aspect, it's giving you the set talking points, the set structure for given situations that then you can execute and actually do
Meghan 23:28
well, and sometimes it's giving you backbone
Collin 23:31
right
Meghan 23:31
when you don't really feel like you have one in this moment in this conversation. It's going okay. I had a backbone four months ago when I wrote this, and here you go. I'm not emotionally okay right now, but I have this script that already has everything in it, and here you go.
Collin 23:46
Yep, and now it does take a human to actually use the template. The human, you will, or your admin, or someone else can read the room. Which template do I use, and which is appropriate here? What can be a template, or maybe this is a special situation where I really do need to craft something different and handle this in a unique way. Maybe I need to change this in some way that it's not. Add a little bit of a more personal sentence to this based off of what I know about those clients before I hit send, and that's something that really takes a template, just boiler plate stuff, adding one or two sentences that is a personal knowledge that you have about them that really helps these land great with the clients, they really receive those well, that the rest of it can just be copied and pasted, but that one sentence really changes it and makes the client feel seen and known.
Meghan 24:41
Yeah, because we've all had that experience of going to a website that we had a question about and going to their chat bot, asking that question, and then basically getting the same reply over and over again, you know, that's that's not very helpful, it doesn't read the tone of what you're trying to say, because that is really important when we. Talk with our clients, automation can't know that this client is going through a really hard time and needs a slightly softer touch, but you will know that the goal is to reduce cognitive load, not remove human judgment. You're still going to potentially waive some policies that you have in certain circumstances. I know a lot of us did that during Covid, we said, "Okay, well, here we go. The world is changing, and we need to adapt our policies. So, yes, you can use Chat GBT or Claude to help write or refine your templates, especially if you feed it examples of things you've already written - again, your handbook, your policies, your SOPs. Train the AI on your voice, share past emails or past notes, client communications. Ask it to write it in your style, your voice. Have it scrape your website to know, okay, this is how this person or this company talks. This brand is this way. It works really well for first drafts. It does not replace your edits, how you would say things, because at the end of the day, you can feed it everything that you have and everything you've done, but that doesn't mean that it's going to get it right.
Collin 26:06
Well, it can still sound really generic AI, no matter which one you're using, no matter how personalized you get it, it can still have this generic tone to it. If you are not customizing it, it can, it misses nuance all of the time, and and and there's just very real questions about how much client communication data we want to be running through a third party AI system, we just have to like that, is however comfortable you feel, and how, whether transparent you want to be with your clients about what you're using that data for, but here's what we've found, where the use case works best, it's in generating options to overcome that blank page paralysis, not autopilot descending, not automatically just copy and pasting whatever it says verbatim. When you hit that moment where you go, I don't know how I'd answer this. Hey, AI, here's what I think I would do. Here's my first draft. Help me get there, and then go back and forth with it, and customize it to you.
Meghan 27:06
Yeah, refine it, make it so I don't have any misspelled words. Make sure the punctuation is correct, and the grammar, and it sounds empathetic enough, or kind enough. If you've been in pet care long enough, you know this truth: the way you show up during the hard moments is what clients remember the most. Pet perennials helps businesses do exactly that. They create beautiful sympathy and milestone gifts for pet parents, and their gift perks program makes it easy to send those gifts directly to your clients. No inventory, no packing boxes, no running to the post office. You simply choose the gift, and Pet Perennials takes care of the rest. They also include a handwritten card and gift wrap at no additional cost. That's the thing we love the most. It's a thoughtful way to support grieving clients while also building the kind of long-term loyalty that great pet businesses are built on. Learn more and open a free gift perks account at Pet perennials.com When we talk about having all these templates and all of these documents, it is important to figure out where they're going to live, where you're going to keep them. So we use Google Docs, that is our favorite. We go to that automatically. It's easy to share with your employees or your admin. It's really searchable, which we need all the time, because we have so many documents. We need to know where the birthdays are, or where the reviews are, and you can access it from anywhere. It's great for growing operations with your admin,
Collin 28:22
a lot of people really like Notion. This is a dedicated app that you download to your phone and to your computer. It provides a lot more structure, and one of the best things about this is that it can organize by category and topics, so think hiring SOPs and hiring scripts, and then the client communications and training, etc. It's in its, I will say this, it can be very overwhelming to set up, but that really robust structure and systems are very helpful to some people, if that's how you're wired and how you like to work, and if you're already using Notion, definitely use it for this, then there's just a generic notes app on your phone, right, if it's, I know we use, we use iPhones, and so we have a notes app, and that's
Meghan 29:02
where that's where I live a lot of times.
Collin 29:04
And it's best if you just need something really fast, you just save it to your phone, it's quick, you know. There's low friction to these. We want to keep these things as low friction as possible, otherwise we won't use them. And here's also just the bonus tip for this as well, is if you are using the notes app on your phone, at least on the iPhone, you can share that with other people, so if you have admin, if you have a business partner, write it in the app, and then share it out to them, so that they can see it, and they can use it, and give input as well.
Meghan 29:37
If you have a pet sitting or dog walking software, and we think you should, you can keep it in there. These templates can live in there, where somebody sends a message, a client sends a message, and you can shoot off a direct response because it's already saved in your platform. This does feel like a lot of upkeep and a lot of maintenance, but it is important. It is going to save you time. Yes, it's going to cost a lot of time setting this up and making sure that you. Have all the scripts that you need, but it is going to save a lot of time on the back end,
Collin 30:04
and yes, it can take a lot of time, especially if you sit down and try and do this all in one day. I will not recommend that. Don't worry about doing everything at once. Start with your highest friction moments, right, the one that you dread most every single time it comes up,
Meghan 30:19
probably pricing,
Collin 30:20
probably pricing right, or maybe it's just something that you handle all of the time, or maybe it's one that you handle inconsistently, so it's just infrequent enough where you forget how you handled it the last time. Start with that, and then once it's written, once it's written well, I should say, make sure it's done. Then go, what does the best version of this message actually look like if I were to optimize this, so that it goes, and I'm going to save that. What will it look like? Refine it, go through a draft, send it off to somebody else to ask for their input, so that they can help edit it. Then use it, then continue to refine it. Here's the thing about templates: you, they should improve over time.
Meghan 31:02
Now, some of these templates are going to be a lot easier than others. So, the birthday one, that's pretty easy. A few sentences, yay, rah rah, happy birthday, have a piece of cake for us.
Collin 31:11
One without xylet, all
Meghan 31:12
right. Those are pretty simple. Your cancelation policy may also be simple if you already have it in your contract and it's already written. That should also kind of just be a copy and paste thing. These other nuanced ones about how you handle keys and overnights and things in your business that are not necessarily a direct policy. Those are going to take a little bit more time,
Collin 31:33
and just focus on adding one new one every month, one new one every month, or two a month would keep it workable for you, and then in the year you've got a lot of things that are built out,
Meghan 31:44
or whenever you, when a client sends you a message and you go, I can't believe I have to write that again, that's your signal in your brain going, okay, well, I need to put it over in my templates, so that I can live there forever now, instead of in my head.
Collin 31:56
Well, and we've talked a lot about this, these templates in the form of text, community, email, written communication. Here's the other powerful thing that happens as you get these templates and these scripts written down, is that it starts to train your instincts for the phone calls, for the in-person interactions at the events, or on the streets, because when you've written down your answer to why do you use a team instead of solos, or why do you do blah blah blah? When you've answered that enough times, you start to say it the same way out loud, because you know the language. It's like you've practiced the script for the play, you know what comes next, you've worked on that, you can be confident, you can be clear, you're not fumbling around trying to remember and do all this stuff, so while we're preparing one format and one context, now I can translate that. Does just translate immediately into every other aspect and touch point that I have with my clients and with my team.
Meghan 32:56
This is particularly valuable if you're training employees to take on client calls, because everybody's gonna have a little bit of a different thing to say, and having them say basically the same thing every time, that's what call centers do, right? They have the scripts, and we're again not trying to be robotic here, but we do need to, we don't want our employees who take the phone calls promising things that we can't actually commit to over promising and then under delivering, because no, Sarah, we don't actually do overnight. I appreciate that you told the client that, but we don't do that, so I don't know how we're gonna make that work now.
Collin 33:32
And by these templates, you can show where the customization is allowed, so whenever you're typing this out, you're gonna have brackets, these little square brackets that you see on your keyboard that nobody uses, right? You put the bracket there that says hello bracket client name or hello bracket pet's name, hello bracket specific situation. This, and keep this to a minimum, one to two designated spots where they can customize the for context here that stays consistent, that way the personal touch makes it into part of the conversation without having to reinvent things all the time. We
Meghan 34:13
aren't saying that this is a salve that's going to cure all of your problems in your pet business, but this is going to help you save a lot of time, not pull your hair out as much, allow you to breathe a little bit easier when that client messages and you don't know what to say, or you are nervous about having this conversation, because a lot of these scripts will be already written for you, and this really is a professionalism issue. The bigger picture here is that in a market where a lot of pet care communication is informal and can be reactive. We see a lot of that on social media. These consistent templates are really a competitive advantage, separating you, making you more professional, allowing your business to be a steady keel, instead of letting your emotions dictate the highs and lows of your community. Communication.
Collin 35:00
When clients receive that consistent, that clear communication from your business, they're going to trust you more, because it signals that these people, this business, they have their act together, and if I'm leaving my pet, my home, my everything in their charge, in their care, in their custody, they better have it together. And so, when we talk about how do I signal that I'm amazing and that I'm professional, it comes down to communication, so that the clients can actually experience that they don't experience the dog walk, they don't experience the litter scoop, they don't experience the pet taxi, but boy, do they experience when there's a problem and they want to ask you about it, or when they have a question and they need that answer.
Meghan 35:47
It also really is a team culture issue. Again, the highs and lows of our emotions should not dictate what we say to clients. It also should not dictate what we say to employees. When we're annoyed at an employee for having done the thing over and over and over again after we've told them not to, we need a backstop. We need to know that just because I want to lash out means that I should not, and I have a script, I know what to say in this moment.
Collin 36:13
Yep, and if you bring on that admin help, that office help, and they use the same language that you use, clients are actually going to feel like they're talking to one cohesive business, and they're not going to say, "Oh, is Sandy there? so I can talk to her about the cancelation policy,
Meghan 36:26
because she's really nice and always gives me leniency on this,
Collin 36:29
or the templates for your training for your team. When you have those installed, it means that new staff, that they know not just what to say, but how your business thinks, and how it thinks about its relationships, and you know that you didn't miss anything. This is why Megan and I began to shoot our own training videos, because we realized that every time I sat down to train somebody, I said the exact same thing every single time, and I would sometimes forget stuff, though, because I was busy, or I was tired, or I was sick, or I was rushed, and then I would go, "Oh, did I actually say that to that person?
Meghan 37:09
Well, and more so, you would come home and talk to me, and I would ask you questions about, did you say this, or this, or this, and you would go, well, I think so, but I don't know,
Collin 37:18
I don't have a way to document this, so, oh, wouldn't it be great if I just had a template and documented what we're actually supposed to do? And above all, this is a sustainability issue for you. You, you got into this business because you love animals and people,
Meghan 37:34
not to answer the same 45 questions over and over and over and over again.
Collin 37:38
Having templates and those scripts, they help protect that love, that passion that you have from being eroded by the grind of that repeated draining communication, or those ongoing consistent little micro decisions that you have to make in every single circumstance, that kind of fatigue, that grind really does get at us, and eventually leads to that compassion fatigue, that burnout that we experience, because I just can't even anymore.
Meghan 38:09
The mental burden, it really takes a toll on
Collin 38:12
us. Yep, copy, paste, change the name, and you're done, and you can actually go on to serve the next client, just like you want to be doing.
Meghan 38:21
Think about one communication that you're going to do this week, that you're going to change, that you're going to make into a template, the one that you're most inconsistent on, or the one that you dread the most, or the one that you get the most. Write that template down, just one, pick one only. Start somewhere, put it somewhere you're actually going to find it. Use it once, see how it feels. Does it feel good to have crafted that message in 13 seconds versus 15 minutes? Well, it should. We appreciate you listening to this episode. If it's resonated with you, please share it with a dog walker or pet sitter friend. We would like to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and Pet Perennials. We will talk with you next time.
Collin 39:00
Bye
