Step-by-step: deflect refill request intake questions for…

Before you open the dashboard, map out your clinic’s refill request intake. This step ensures the agent handles the right requests in the right way.

Decide what you’ll deflect. List the medications and scenarios the agent can process without a phone call—for example, routine heartworm prevention, flea/tick control, or chronic meds with a current annual exam. Exclude controlled substances or new prescriptions that require a vet’s direct approval. Write down the exact steps your team follows today: what information must be collected, what checks are required, and how the request reaches the person who fills it.

Gather your knowledge base. The agent needs your clinic’s refill policy, frequently asked questions, hours of operation, and any forms or instructions you want it to reference. Save these as clean PDFs or text notes (a staff meeting handout, the policy page from your practice website, or a short internal doc). The stronger the source material, the more accurate the answers.

Define the custom action fields. Decide which details you’ll ask the client to provide inside the chat—pet name, owner name, medication and dosage, pickup preference, and any clarifying notes. Keep the form short enough that a client completes it in under two minutes.

For more industry-specific guidance, see how we tailor agents to Veterinary Clinics.

Now build the agent in Chatref. You’ll create the knowledge base, add the custom action, and connect the shared inbox—in that order.

1. Create a new agent and upload your refill content.
   From the Chatref dashboard, start a new agent. Upload the documents you gathered: the refill policy, office hours, and any FAQ. The agent will learn from these and answer questions like “How do I refill my dog’s heartworm pills?” directly from your own words. This step uses your veterinary clinics knowledge base immediately.

2. Set up the refill custom action.
   Add a custom action named “Prescription Refill Request.” Define the fields: pet name (text), owner name (text), medication and dosage (text or dropdown), pickup preference (options like “in-clinic” or “curbside”), and additional notes. When a client talks to the agent and indicates they want a refill, the agent will present this structured form directly in the chat. This is one of the most valuable veterinary clinics custom actions because it replaces a multi-step phone call with a single, consistent intake.

3. Connect the shared inbox.
   Link the agent to your clinic’s shared inbox. When the custom action form is submitted, the conversation—along with the collected details—appears in the inbox for your team. A staff member can then verify the request, check the chart, and confirm the refill. This keeps the workflow inside one tool and gives the client a continuous thread, even if a human needs to follow up. It’s how your veterinary clinics shared inbox steps in with full context.

4. Test before you publish.
   Use the live playground inside Chatref to run through common scenarios: a client asks about refill turnaround time, then another says “I need more flea meds.” Confirm that the agent answers policy questions from the knowledge base and then triggers the custom action at the right moment. Let two team members review the test conversations for tone and completeness.

Move the agent into production in a way your clients will actually notice.

Embed the widget on your website.
Copy the snippet from the Chatref install screen and add it to your clinic’s homepage and refill-information page. The widget will appear in the bottom corner. Because it’s origin-allowlisted, it won’t appear anywhere else.

Update your phone message and outgoing emails.
After-hours voicemail messages and appointment confirmation emails are the two highest-leverage places to mention the new chat option. Add a line like “For quick refill requests, start a chat on our website anytime—we’ll get back to you faster than voicemail.”

Tell your team what to expect.
Hold a 10-minute huddle where you show staff how the shared inbox works: what a submitted refill request looks like, how to respond, and when to move the conversation back to the phone. Set a realistic first-week goal—for example, process all chat-submitted refills within two hours during business hours and within an hour of opening the next morning.

After two weeks, review what changed inside Chatref Insights and your own phones.

Check the agent’s conversation tags.
Chatref automatically tags conversations by topic. Count how many are tagged “refill” or similar, and look at the custom action completion rate. Those numbers tell you how many refill calls the clinic likely didn’t receive.

Listen to a random sample of chats.
Read through a dozen refill conversations from the shared inbox. Note whether the information collected is complete enough for a staff member to act without calling the client back. Adjust the custom action form if you see repeated gaps (e.g., missing a preferred pharmacy field).

Compare front-desk call volume.
Ask your team: are there noticeably fewer refill-related voicemails? Even an informal tally of calls received during the two busiest hours of the day can show whether the deflection is working.

Iterate from insights.
If you find that clients still call about a specific medication because the policy detail wasn’t clear, add a sentence to the knowledge base document and re-upload it. Chatref re-learns in minutes, and the next answer improves.

What causes refill request intake problems for Veterinary Clinics?

The root cause is that refills generate a high volume of short, repetitive interactions—often while staff are checking in animals or assisting the veterinarian. After-hours requests pile up in voicemail and email, and inconsistent information (a client who forgets the medication name, a staff member who misses a field) leads to multiple callbacks. Small teams simply cannot answer every refill call instantly, and the backlog creates delays that frustrate clients.

How do I improve refill request intake for Veterinary Clinics?

Replace the back-and-forth phone loop with a structured intake flow. Use a knowledge base that answers the most common refill questions (turnaround time, what’s needed to authorize) so clients self-serve the basics. Then capture the remaining request through a short custom action form that collects pet, owner, and medication details in one go. Route submissions to a shared inbox so a staff member can review and act without starting a new call chain. This removes the bottlenecks of live-answer calls and incomplete voicemails.