How to Make the Most of Your Reminder Phone Calls

Making a phone call can sometimes be daunting. For this reason, it may be a struggle for your staff to manually make reminder phone calls or voice reminders. Not only is it time consuming, but it also puts your staff on the spot. Additionally, your staff may be overwhelmed or burned out and make a mistake when they personally make appointment reminder calls. They might list customers or patients as "confirmed" instead of "canceled," or leave a message with the incorrect time. In addition to eliminating human error, automated appointment reminder calls decrease no shows and missed appointments drastically. Automated appointment reminder calls are easy, quick, and affordable.

Automated Appointment Reminders

There are three main types of automated appointment reminders. Text message reminders, email reminders, and voice reminders. These are not “one size fits all” and depend heavily on your customers or patients, business, and staff. We have discussed text reminders and email reminders in other posts, so in this post we will focus on phone call reminders, how to best use them, and why they are so important.

Why Use Automated Appointment Reminder Phone Calls

Text messages and email messages are not for every business and every client or patient. To begin, not all customers or patients have a cell phone that they use for text messages. Not all patients and customers have a computer or cell phone for emails. Most people, however, possess some sort of personal phone. If a client does not have a cell phone, they most likely have a landline. Voice Reminders are an excellent tool to reduce missed appointments for many customers.

Getting Started with Reminder Calls in 2 easy steps

These are the first steps of making a voice appointment reminder with software like Reminderly.

Step 1: The first step is to make an account with an appointment reminder software. At Reminderly, we offer a 14-day free trial without requiring a credit card number. Our setup is also extremely easy, and most users can complete it in under five minutes. In other words, you can start sending automated reminder calls for free in under five minutes.

Explanation: Part of the setup process is getting your business information and syncing your calendar to our software. We know that there are many types of calendars and new calendar apps being created daily, so while we can sync automatically with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, we also offer the opportunity for you to download your calendar and upload it to our site. This is still faster than making one manual appointment reminder phone call.

Step 2: Under "Create Reminder," you will set up for your first reminder message. In this section, you can create a new reminder by giving it a name, for example, "Daily Reminder Call." You can select how many days or hours in advance you would like the reminder to be sent, choose English or Spanish, and select from which calendar you are using. Select the type of reminder, i.e. voice reminder, text message reminder, or email reminder and begin to insert your message.

As you write the text for reminder calls, you can use the "insert field" section and choose from "appointment time," "appointment date," "appointment location," and "appointment title." This gives you the flexibility to craft your own message while utilizing automatic placement of important fields.

Maximize your Appointment Reminder Phone Call

Keeping the text short and sweet is important. While text messages are required to be under 160 characters, a phone call is more flexible. While that is true, it's important to keep in mind that clients and patients do not want to spend a lot of time on the phone listening about their upcoming appointment. So it is important to communicate the important details quickly.

Result: Fewer Missed Appointments

Appointment reminder calls are proven to reduce no shows by 70-90%. Reminding patients and clients about their appointments should not be the sole job of your staff members. Sending automated appointment reminders are a win-win for your patients and customers and your staff - your customer miss fewer appointments, and your staff has more time to spend on the other critical tasks every day.