Best Ways to Avoid No Shows

When a client no shows to their appointment, it is frustrating and costly. It wastes your time, the time of your staff members, resources, and money. No show rates vary significantly by industry and appointment type, but these rates can be significantly reduced by using appointment reminders. Using appointment reminder software not only can reduce no shows, but it is an investment in the future and health of your business.

The True Cost of Missed Appointments

Before we delve into how appointment reminders reduce no shows, let's discuss how much no shows cost your business. No show rates vary based on a variety of factors including the industry, but typically businesses experience a no-show rate of 10%-20%. This adds up to a staggering amount of revenue loss every year. Additionally, sometimes clients don't entirely miss their appointment, but rather they may show up significantly late. This can have a cascading effect that negatively impacts all of your clients throughout your day. If a client who is always on time perpetual experiences delays at your business due to other clients' tardiness, they may ultimately take their business elsewhere, leading to further revenue loss in the future.

Sending Appointment Reminders

Appointment reminders are the single best way to reduce missed appointments. There are multiple ways to send appointment reminders: text messages, email reminders, and phone calls. The first step is to identify how the patient or client would like to receive their appointment reminder. Appointment reminder messages, either by email or text message, may not be for everyone or even every industry. A geriatric physician or lawyer practicing elder law will likely want to rely on appointment reminder calls. While other types of businesses, however, such as a salon or gym classes that require registration, text message appointment reminders may be the most effective option for younger clients. Text appointment reminders also offer easy access to provide an appointment confirmation.

Manual Appointment Reminders vs. Automated Appointment Reminders

Manual Reminders: If you or your business has never used automated appointment reminder software, you likely have done manual reminders. This involves a significant amount of time and energy to manually make phone reminder messages, send appointment reminder texts, and email appointment reminders. Not only is this time consuming, it is also tedious and taxing on employees. Additionally, this can easily make your business schedule and calendar more susceptible to human error. Perhaps the person sending the appointment reminders or attempting to confirm appointments accidentally sent the wrong date or time which would cause more client confusion.

Automated Appointment Reminders: Sending appointment reminders has never been simpler. While you can fully customize manual appointment reminders, you can also fully customize automated appointment reminders. This is not only more effective and simpler, but it also helps employees save time and allows you and your staff to focus on other important tasks.

How Reminderly Simplifies Appointment Reminders

Reminderly appointment reminder software is specifically created to be easy to use and accessible to users regardless of their industry. Our automated system is fully customizable so that you can communicate with your clients in a way that is best for you.

Communicate with Clients Right Away. After creating a Reminderly account, you can begin messaging clients and sending appointment reminders right away. Under our "messaging" section, you can begin sending text messages in real-time to your clients, so that you can communicate back and forth. You can also begin sending reminder messages right away. You can send individual reminders to clients or create a group that sends reminders with the confidentially of sending a message with recipients that are BCC'ed.

Easily Sync Your Calendar: Our system enables businesses to easily sync your calendar to our software. You can download an extension so that your calendar is synced automatically. Integration with Google Calendars and Outlook Calendars is very easy. Alternatively, you can download your appointment schedule and upload it to our software using comma separated values or Excel spreadsheets. Each of these steps is simple and easy to complete. Even if you or your business uses software that does not sync with our system, downloading and uploading files takes the same amount of time as making one manual reminder phone calls. Once connected, your calendar automatically syncs so that you can see upcoming appointments in the next 24 hours, manage automated appointment reminders, and additionally analyze appointment history.

Customize Each Appointment Reminder with Reminderly

Text Message Reminders: While text messages are easy to customize, it is important to remember that each upcoming appointment reminder text has a maximum character limit of 160 characters. Fitting a friendly reminder into 160 characters may be easy for some and harder for others. That is why our customer service department offers customized and hands-on services for Reminderly users.

Email Reminder: Email reminders offer more flexibility when writing a reminder message for an upcoming appointment. You have more space if you need to include more detailed information in your reminders. It is also easy to add multiple links to additional information. As with text reminders, you can include message variables such as the appointment date, appointment time, and location.

Phone Reminder: With a phone reminder, you have full access to customization, unencumbered by 160 character limits of text messages. Additionally, we offer the option of using a pre-recorded reminder using a voice actor (simple contact us if you would like us to pre-record a message for you).