Business houses often send text reminder messages to confirm availability, remind about the timings and to reduce no-shows. Customers prefer text appointment reminders over phone calls and emails because they are short and quick. How to Use Business Text Messaging Appointment Reminder
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What is the importance of appointment reminder messages for business?
Many businesses depend upon clients to remember the appointments fixed previously. If the clients do not show up at the time of the appointment, there is no sale or service. Moreover, late clients and no-shows can make a perfectly organized business quite chaotic and messy. No-shows are the biggest losses for businesses because they do not get the money they could have with the sale or service. Furthermore, they also lose other potential clients who could have come in the timing appointed by the no-show client.
According to a survey done by the BioMed Central, it was revealed that the average cost of no-show per patient is $196. When this number gets multiplied by every missed appointment, you can determine the gross revenue lost.
When you send appointment reminders, you not only remind a client who might have genuinely forgotten, you also increase the chances of getting a cancellation request, in case the client is seriously busy. This, in turn, makes the time slot available to book other appointments. But does that mean that a company should keep sending personal appointment reminders to each and every client? Well, no, now by automating appointment reminders, it is possible to reduce the amount of office time and send business appointment reminders by text easily.
When you send appointment reminders in the mail, there is a high possibility of clients not reading them in time and also a possibility of such emails accumulating in the junk folder of the recipient. In such cases, a quick SMS text reminder works well and has the maximum opening and reading rate.
How to Send Effective Business Text Messaging Appointment Reminders?
So now that you are convinced that texts can help for business appointment reminders, let us see how we can write more effective ones.
- Keep your messages short and easy to understand
- Ask patients to confirm with Y or N.
- Include the date, time, service and location of the appointment. It is necessary to include the timings in the reminder because clients might forget and you have a no-show. Moreover, if you have many branches in one city, you should include the location, because the client might reach another branch which is fully booked.
- Remind patients to bring the required documents or paperwork.
- Send business appointment reminder messages between 11 am to 5 pm, as these are the standard office hours.
Integration with Google Calendar and Various Other Applications
While choosing a text appointment sending software, ensure that it has Google calendar integration. This will allow you to manage appointments directly with the interface of Google’s calendar. The appointments set up in the Calendar will be scheduled for a text alert automatically as per the delivery schedule. This enables the clients to confirm or cancel the appointment with a text message.
By downloading a good business text messaging appointment reminder software, you can use many tools to send SMS text messages to individuals or groups such as from your applications, website, servers or even from email. All you need to do is to connect your application or website with the software API and then send a text message from the command line. To send personalized text messages, you can send from Excel using an Excel to text integrated tool.
Who can use Text Appointment Reminder Software?
- Businesses who need to send reminders to customers about promotions and special events.
- Medical offices who need to send friendly reminders to patients for their upcoming appointments and follow-up visits
- Churches and other such religious institutions can send notifications of upcoming fundraisers, events, and other such special meetings.
- Spas and Salons can send text messages to clients of their fixed appointments.
What are the Features of a Good Text Messaging Service Software?
- The new apps for sending business text appointment reminders support more than 160 characters.
- They support HTTP & SMPP interface for receiving and sending messages.
- A good app should be able to access more than 800 carriers in more than 200 countries for sending and receiving messages.
- It should have a robust text message delivery platform.
- Confirmation/Cancellation feature should be embedded. Clients should have the ability to confirm or cancel their appointments with just a simple SMS reply. With such automated services, you can save on recruiting staff responsible for doing this work manually. Your clients will receive an automated confirmation message.
- You should be able to create customized templates for different types of appointments in a good appointment reminder tool. A good tool allows you to personalize reminder text message, confirmation or cancellation response, etc for your business.
- You should be able to configure appointment reminders to send many notifications prior to the appointments at different time intervals such as 7 days or last hour reminder.
- A good tool should enable you to enter appointments for various clients all at one from just an easy to use web interface. You should be able to set up multiple reminders by importing details from a spreadsheet.
- Also, make sure that you get follow-up text messages in the tool so that your staff can receive email or text notification of any last-minute cancellations.