Product Updates

6 Reasons You Should be Using Appointment Reminders

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Martina

There are a variety of benefits to using automated reminders to remind your clients of upcoming appointments, benefits for both you and for your clients.

[1] Reduce No-shows:

Every missed appointment represents lost revenue. Even a relatively low no-show rate when extrapolated out over a year can make a significant dent in your annual revenues.

  • If you charge $25 per appointment for your service and you have a low no-show rate of only 1 per day. That still equates to $125 per week or $6,500 per year.
  • A consultant earning $150 per appointment, with an average of 3 no-shows per day is losing $117,000 per year.

Typical no-show rates vary according to industry, private medical appointments are often around 30%.

Read on for more.

[2] Deploy Resources Effectively

DiaryMonitor enables your customers to respond to reminder messages to indicate confirmation or cancellation of an appointment. This means you can see in advance who has cancelled an appointment. This enables you to organise your staff and resources such as rooms and equipment more effectively.

[3] Reduce Waiting Lists

Knowing in advance who has cancelled an appointment enables you to rebook those  vacant time slots. This helps you reduce waiting list and organise your time more effectively.

[4] Contract Acceptance

DiaryMonitor users tell us that using DiaryMonitor has helped eliminate the gray area surrounding charging clients for missed appointments. By replying to a reminder message and confirming an appointment, your customer has inferred an acceptance of contract.

[5] Clients Appreciate Them

The number 1 reason for missing appointments is that the person simply forgot. A simple SMS or email reminder a few days before an appointment is appreciated by your customer, it helps them to stay organised too.

Where you have developed a working relationship with a client they can be embarrassed if they forget an appointment. Clients may sometimes even change their service provider rather than tackle the embarrassment of having to face you again after a no-show. Using a reminder system makes it easy for them to keep appointments.

[6] Reduce Appointment Admin Time

Some businesses phone or send postal reminders for each and every upcoming appointment. They also then field phone calls from clients confirming appointments. Using an automated system removes that admin overhead. It’s also substantially cheaper than phone calls or postal reminders.