Increase Your Revenue With Automated Appointment Reminders

Any professional or personal service company can benefit from an appointment reminder service. The bottom line is a suddenly empty slot in your daily appointment calendar is hurting your bottom line. One easy way around this is by using an automated service that can remind them of the date and time scheduled for your next appointment.

The industry being hurt most by missed appointments is the medical industry. Patient no-shows and late call outs can be as high as 8%. Patients may not realize that they are costing you money when they don’t show up because they are not considering the overhead costs that it takes to run your office. If you are finding that you have blocks of unprofitable free time throughout the day due to missed appointments, you should be considering implementing an appointment reminder service to help eliminate them.

Automated phone messages can serve as a reminder of the details of your scheduled appointment. The message should be short and to the point, mentioning the purpose of the appointment, the date and the time. You could also politely mention other useful information such as if they are a no-show how they will be billed.

Schedule your voice message to go out at 48 hours before the scheduled appointment time. Mention that in order to avoid being charged as a no-show they should let your office know no less than 24 hours ahead of time if they need to reschedule and give them a phone number to call to do that. Or better yet, ask them to answer yes or no to the question of whether they can be expected to show up. A telephone polling feature offered by an appointment reminder service like DialMyCalls can track the response for you and send it straight to your account.

If they answer no, or call and cancel on time then you have time to fill a slot that they have now vacated.

Other businesses need this type of appointment reminding system as well. Nail and beauty salons lose money on walk-ins when they hold a spot for a customer who made an appointment and then fails to show up. Law offices too are plagued with clients not showing up for scheduled meetings, potentially costing the attorney hundreds of dollars in fees he or she could have been collecting.

Appointment reminding with recorded messages will also improve the way an office is run and make it more pleasurable for clients who do show up on time. To combat missed appointments, many offices will overbook time slots, anticipating that a certain percentage will not show up. This leaves clients in the waiting room longer then they should be, causing delays that could take hours to catch up on.

It is an unfortunate fact of business that the occasional client is going to completely forget about a scheduled appointment. Your client’s lives are probably busy too and it could be easy to overlook a visit to the doctor’s office or an appointment to get your hair dyed. You can substantially decrease the odds of missed appointments by sending clients a polite automated appointment reminder beforehand. At the time of scheduling the appointment, let your patient/customer know that they can give you their phone number to opt-in to receiving a reminder call and/or text regarding their upcoming appointment – of course they always do have the option of opting out of any appointment reminders from you.