Veterinary Virtual Receptionist and Answering Service
Short on staff, not on calls.
Frontly answers during consults and books the visit, so your nurses stay with patients.
The short answer
What is Frontly's veterinary virtual receptionist?
Frontly is an AI receptionist and answering service for Australian veterinary clinics. It answers every call 24/7, books and changes appointments, takes prescription and test-result messages for your team, and puts emergencies through to your on-call vet or emergency clinic. It never gives veterinary advice. Standard inbound answering is live in about an hour.
THE PROBLEM
A Short-Staffed Clinic Cannot Also Cover the Phones
36.8%
of veterinary vacancies took 12 months or longer to fill in the AVA workforce survey. When roles stay empty, the vets and nurses you do have are pulled away from the phone.
Source: Australian Veterinary Association Workforce Survey, 2023/24
38%
of the veterinary profession take part in after-hours on-call work. The calls that reach your on-call vet should be the ones that need a vet.
Source: Australian Veterinary Association Workforce Survey, 2021
66%
of veterinarians would prefer to do less or no on-call work. A receptionist that answers first and routes true emergencies takes that load off them.
Source: Australian Veterinary Association Workforce Survey, 2021
HEAR IT FOR YOURSELF
Your AI Receptionist Is Ready to Book a Vaccination
Call our AI agent right now. It handles a vaccination booking and a worried owner the way it would for your clinic. No signup required.
Test Call
Talk to the AI agent right now from your browser. Hear exactly how Frontly will sound for your business.
HOW IT WORKS
Live in About an Hour. No Disruption to Your Consults.
Connect Your Phone
Forward your existing clinic line or use a dedicated AI number. No hardware changes, and your team keeps answering when they can.
We Help Set Up Your First Workflow
Our team helps set up your first workflow around your consult types, opening hours, on-call roster and the emergency clinic you send overflow to.
Go Live
Frontly answers every call, books appointments, passes emergencies to your on-call vet, and phones clients with reminders.
WHAT FRONTLY HANDLES
Every Vet Clinic Call, Handled
From a puppy's first vaccination to a worried owner on a Sunday, this veterinary virtual receptionist answers the calls your team cannot get to. Flat monthly rate, every call captured in your Frontly dashboard.
Appointments and changes
Takes the owner's details, the pet's name and species and the reason for the visit, then books, moves or cancels the consult, vaccination, desexing or dental appointment.
Emergencies, routed not triaged
Uses the urgent wording you set, then puts the call through to your on-call vet or gives your chosen emergency clinic's details. It never gives veterinary advice.
Prescription and refill requests
Takes the pet, the medication or food and the owner's contact details, then hands the request to the right vet or nurse to approve. Frontly never approves a script.
Test results and records
Takes a message for the vet or nurse about results or a records transfer, so your team calls back with the answer. Frontly does not read out or interpret results.
New clients and pets
Captures the owner's details and the pet's species, breed and age before the first visit, and answers your hours, parking, puppy school and boarding questions.
Upset owners and bill shock
Stays calm with an angry caller, shares only the fees you have loaded, and transfers to a team member when the call needs a person. The transcript is on file.
OUTBOUND CAMPAIGNS
Reminder Campaigns Over Your Client List
Load a list and Frontly works through it, retrying unanswered numbers and logging every outcome. Do Not Call Register screening and legal calling windows are built in, and promotional campaigns go only to your opted-in list.
Vaccination reminder campaign
Frontly calls every client on your due list, tells them their pet's vaccination is due, and books a time. Unanswered numbers are retried and every outcome is logged.
Annual check-up campaign
Frontly rings clients whose pets are due a yearly check, offers your next available times, and books those who say yes, so due pets return before they lapse.
Appointment confirmation campaign
The day before, Frontly calls tomorrow's appointments to confirm, change or cancel, so you can re-offer any freed time to the next client.
Dental month and wellness campaign
Frontly phones your opted-in list during dental month or a wellness drive, answers questions from the details you provide, and books the clients who are interested.
Visual Workflow Builder
Script Your Front Desk Without Code
Your First Workflow, Built With You
Our team helps set up your first workflow around your consult types, on-call roster and emergency clinic: exactly what the AI asks before it books or transfers.
Rules for Every Kind of Call
Route an emergency to your on-call vet, a refill to a nurse and a booking straight into the diary, each on its own path.
Urgent Wording You Control
Set the words that mark a call as urgent. Frontly routes those calls and never gives veterinary advice.
Change It Yourself
Update hours, holiday trading and your emergency clinic's details any time in the visual builder, without waiting on us.
Branch by Time of Day
Handle consult hours, the lunch break and after-close differently, so an overnight call never follows the same path as a Tuesday morning.
Cross-Call Memory
Your AI Remembers Every Owner and Pet
- Returning owners recognised the moment they call
- Past calls and pet details recalled automatically
- No asking a regular client to repeat their pet's name and history
- Full call history on every caller before your team picks up
Frontly Dashboard
Every Booking and Message Captured While Your Team Is With Patients
Every Booking in One Place
Bookings arrive with the owner, pet, species and reason for the visit already captured, so your nurse actions them between consults.
Full Transcript on Every Call
Read exactly what the owner said, including a heated call, which helps when you review a dispute.
Messages Sent to Your Phone
Email or SMS the refill request or results message to the right vet or nurse the moment the call ends.
Outcomes You Can Count
Every call ends with a labelled outcome, so you see bookings, emergencies routed and messages taken by phone.
Live Status Across the Clinic
See what came in during consults on one screen, and which calls were put through to staff.
Outbound Campaign Manager
Bring Pets Back With Reminder Campaigns
Reminder Campaigns at Scale
Frontly calls your whole due list, so vaccination and check-up reminders are no longer a job for your nurses.
Confirmations and Call-Backs
Confirm tomorrow's appointments in one campaign, so a freed time can be re-offered to the next client.
Same Builder, No New Tool
Script each campaign in the same visual builder you used for inbound calls.
See What Landed
Track which campaigns booked pets in, so you know which reminder to run again.
INTEGRATIONS
Works with the software veterinary already runs on
Connect your AI receptionist to the software your team already uses, so Frontly can check availability, manage bookings and capture caller details as part of your reception workflow.
Team messaging
CRM, calendars and productivity
Integrations support Frontly's reception and caller follow-up workflows. Available actions depend on the connected software and your setup.
Integration allowances vary by plan. See Pricing for what's included.
Not on the list, or need a specific workflow? Tell us what you use and what you'd like Frontly to handle. We'll check what's possible.
ANSWERING SERVICE OR AI
Should a vet clinic use an answering service or an AI receptionist?
An answering service takes a message about a sick pet and someone rings back. An AI receptionist books the appointment, takes the repeat prescription or results message for your team, and puts a genuine emergency straight through to your on-call vet. It gives no veterinary advice, and the phone stops competing with the patient on the table.
Where a staffed answering service still wins
A person hears a frightened owner. Someone describing a pet that has eaten something toxic is often panicking, and a calm human voice deciding within seconds whether to send them to the emergency clinic is hard to beat. Keep a person in that path, and Frontly transfers to your on-call vet whenever the situation calls for it.
Where Frontly wins
The rest of the day is vaccinations, repeat prescriptions, results enquiries and booking a consult. Frontly handles those at any hour, calls clients with reminders, and lands every call in your dashboard, so your nurses are not answering the phone with an animal in their hands.
Most businesses end up running one or the other rather than both. If you are weighing it up properly, the full cost and capability breakdown is in Frontly against a virtual receptionist.
Bigger organisation?
Vet groups and multi-clinic networks
Enterprise builds voice experiences to measure for a group of clinics, connected to your own systems during the call. Own-cloud or on-premise deployment, SLA-backed uptime and a dedicated account manager.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Frontly routes emergencies but never judges them clinically. You set the urgent wording, and when a caller uses it Frontly puts the call through to your on-call vet or gives the details of your chosen emergency clinic. It gives no veterinary advice and does not triage, so every clinical decision stays with your vets.
Frontly follows the path you set for closed hours. For an urgent call it tries your on-call vet, then a backup number, and can give your emergency clinic's details if nobody answers. Routine callers can still book a consult, and every call is saved in your dashboard for the morning.
ezyVet is listed as Requires vendor approval, so the software company approves the connection first. Frontly does not write bookings into it today. Bookings land in your Frontly dashboard with the owner, pet and reason for the visit, and your team enters them from there. Either way, your AI can answer calls in about an hour.
Frontly takes the request but never approves it. It records the pet, the medication or food and the owner's contact details, then sends the message to the vet or nurse you choose to review. The owner is told the clinic will call back, and the team keeps full control of every script.
Yes. Load your due list and Frontly calls each client, says the pet is due, offers times and books those who say yes. Unanswered numbers are retried and every outcome is logged. Calls are screened against the Do Not Call Register and kept to legal calling windows. Dental month and wellness drives go only to an opted-in list.
Frontly answers calmly and warm-transfers an upset caller to your team with a spoken briefing, so the owner does not have to repeat themselves. You set which calls go to a person, such as billing disputes or a distressed owner. Every call has a full transcript saved in your dashboard for review.
Frontly only shares the fees you load into its knowledge, such as your consult fee or your desexing price range. It will not invent a figure or estimate a treatment cost. For anything else it takes a message or transfers to a team member, which also helps reduce bill shock on the phone.
Yes. Frontly asks the owner's name and contact details and the pet's name, species, breed and age, then books the first consult. Everything is captured as a structured record in your Frontly dashboard, so your nurse can prepare the file before the owner walks in.
Every call gets a full transcript in your Frontly dashboard, so you can review a dispute word for word. The transcript shows exactly what the owner asked and how Frontly responded, including any call it routed to your on-call vet.
A human after-hours service answers the phone and passes messages on. A clinic also needs daytime overflow during consults, vaccination and check-up reminder campaigns over the due lists you load, urgent calls put straight through to your on-call vet, and outcome reporting across every call. Frontly covers those, speaks more than 40 languages, and comes with a first workflow set up with you.
KEEP EXPLORING
Keep exploring Frontly for Veterinary
Go deeper on the capabilities, comparisons, and guides that matter most.
24/7 inbound answering
How Frontly answers every call, qualifies the caller, and books the job in your dashboard.
How inbound worksOutbound campaigns
Recalls, follow-ups, arrears, and lead reactivation dialled automatically at scale.
Run outboundAfter-hours answering
Worried owners ring overnight. See how urgent calls reach your on-call vet or emergency clinic, with no advice given.
See after-hoursVirtual receptionist cost in 2026
What human and AI receptionists actually cost in Australia, and where each wins.
Read the guideReady to Answer Every Call, Even With a Patient on the Table?
Set up your AI veterinary receptionist in about an hour. No commitment beyond the plan you pick. Flat monthly rate.