Get the Best Pet Sitter to Care for Your Most Prized Possessions, Your Pets
The owner of FurBabies & Friends, Kristie Halverson, has been a log time dog owner and foster. During her time in corporate America, there were several times she had to travel for business leaving her with the hard decision of who was going to care for her dogs. She tried facilities, sending her dogs to family members, to even having an in home overnight pet sitter. Hands down, her dogs were the happiest staying in their home, a familiar environment, and keeping their same schedule and routine.
Due to these experiences, Kristie felt it important to offer other pet parents this option while also taking the fear and trepidation away from owners in regards to having to leave their pets. Over the years she has heard numerous horror stories from clients with other pet sitters either not showing up, cancelling last minute, to not staying for the whole duration of the visit. Not to mention media coverage of terrible abuse from a rover or wag pet sitter. As you can see from our 130+ all 5* reviews, this is something you will never need to worry about.
Kristie takes a very hands on approach starting with an initial meet and greet with her first. This allows clients to get a feel for her, the business, the detailed processes in place, the rigorous selection of who meets the standards and qualifications to be a part of the pet sitting team, communication guidelines, to streamlined forms for disbursement of information and safety.
As mentioned above, all pet sitters are vetted thoroughly. This includes both a phone interview and an in person interview where Kristie observes the pet sitters interactions with her own dogs. This allows her to gauge true interest, passion, understanding, and care of animals while also allowing her to assess other crucial aspects such as timeliness, reliability, and communication skills. From there, a background check is run by TruthFinder.com to ensure there are no major red flags like animal abuse, robbery, assault, or murder are a part of that potential pet sitters history. Next, the pet sitter shadows other more seasoned sitters to understand FurBabies & Friends processes, procedures and communication guidelines. This allows both Kristie, and more veteran pet sitters, to assess the potential new hire in even greater detail to ensure the safety of both our clients and their pets. After all of these steps are complete and both Kristie and her team of pet sitters have discussed everything, only then is the new pet sitter able to slowly start pet sitting for the clients.
Lastly, pet parents are always kept well informed. Before a pet parent leaves, they will receive a message detailing out the schedule for their trip including what time the pet sitter will be there, give or take 15 minutes, which person will be there for the job and for how long. Kristie will also send you every pet sitters contact info with their picture in the contact so if you have cameras you will know who is in your house, and every sitter will also be wearing a business branded t-shirt for identification both in and out of the house. Lastly, if there is a need more more than one pet sitter, the clients, Kristie and any pet sitter helping with the pets will be on one group message to make sure everyone is in the know and on the same page.
When the time comes for us to start our pet sitting with you, every pet sitter will send an arrival message through the group message upon pulling up to your house so you don't need to worry if someone is showing up. After the visit, the sitter will send a detailed recap of everything that happened during the visit, how each one of the pets are doing, what they did together, along with pictures and videos. All of this communication is done to keep our pet parents feeling comfortable and relieved that their furbabies are doing great!
FurBabies & Friends Pet Sitter Selection Process, Scheduling, & Info Sharing
Since the start in May of 2017, Kristie built a team of independent contractors for dog walking and pet sitting to match the growing need for pet care services. During this expansion, Kristie and the team have also had a chance to define, redefine, and iterate on the businesses policyies and procedures to ensure the best experience not only for our clients and their fur babies but also for the team itself.
One of the best tools the team uses for scheduling, communication, and knowledge transference is an app called Sling. Not only does this app greatly improve our scheduling process it also has a feature that serves as a type of social media feed, but solely used for our clients information sharing and critical team updates. Each client has their own electronic file that stores all of the pertinent information including pictures of all pets, copies of all clients standardized forms, posts about other important information gathered by prior pet sitters or additional details from the clients. This electronic filing system is every pet sitters go to for problem solving or to ensure proper care is given to every pet including feeding schedule, quantity and has the veterinary release form allowing us to authorize emergency care for a pet in the owners absence. All of these processes and procedures have been perfected on over the last 5 years making a pet sitting experience with FurBabies & Friends a stress free, streamlined, and safe experience. We make sure to have all of the bases covered for any event, seen or unforeseen, in addition to our pet sitting insurance and bonding, allowing every pet parent to feel safe and secure while your pets are in our care.
