In this high paced and busy life, a lot of people forget about their scheduled appointments. This is the life of 2022, the covid pandemic, work from home, new variants every day, and so on. A lot has been going on in people’s lives and everyone is doing whatever they can to just hang tight until the pandemic gets over. So now more than ever people are missing their appointment or remembering them so late that cancellation becomes inevitable. To solve this problem and to help people go to their appointments on time use a good SMS appointment reminder tool today.
According to research by the journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 40 to 80% of all medical information is immediately forgotten by people as soon as they leave their appointment at the hospital or medical establishment. The situation is no different for other industries too. People simply do not have much bandwidth capacity to store information, much less remember about appointments after a month or so.
This phenomenon is frustrating to see as a company. Because a company has to make sure that people show up on their committed appointment otherwise the time will be wasted. A lot of resources and manpower are deployed to ensure customer satisfaction during their appointments, but all that would be in vain if the customer does not show up at their appointments nor inform the business about their unavailability before the appointment date. Here is an awesome SMS appointment reminder. Use it to reduce your appointment no-shows.
So here are 5 benefits of Using an Appointment Reminder and Confirmation Text:
1. Guaranteed Delivery
According to research by small business trends, 66% of Americans check their phone 160 times in a day, at least. That’s quite an opportunity if you ask. There are very few message delivery mechanisms that do not rely on an active internet connection to be transmitted. SMS is one of them. SMS does not require the internet and it is very fast too and every phone user regardless of their operating software already has an SMS app.
So the content will be delivered for sure. But regarding whether they will read your SMS or not, that’s a different aspect. So if you are sure of your SMS content like message drafting, key appointment details, and other necessary data then you can send your clients an SMS about the same and their appointment in all probability will stay as it was originally intended.
Also read: Best 15 Time Management Apps & Tools Track Your Time
2. Time-Saving
Sending an SMS does not require much time. All you need is some pre-saved drafts and a few variable data points and you are all set to go. This entire process can be automated too, hence saving you a lot of time and other resources. You can buy an SMS automation SAAS (Software As A Service) and just go along your usual way of business.
If you want to go more advanced then you can buy an Ai or Machine Learning Enabled software to automate the variable data points too. For example- suppose you are in a grocery shop and you want to remind people to pick up their fresh cow milk order as soon as they can in the morning. So the fixed data text of this event is fresh cow milk pick up and the variable data point is the quantity and the number of people who ordered this milk.
3. Little Disturbance When Compared To Calls
Everybody is busy in their life and when you call them to remind them of their appointment, the effects could be disastrous for you as a brand. Sending an SMS is the least disturbing method to communicate with customers rather than directly calling them. A single notification tone plays in their phone and that’s a good thing in a way that whenever customers will be free they will respond to the text. So you will not be forcing your text to be read by customers rather customers themselves will read the SMS in their own free time.
4. Phone Calendar Integration
Gone are the days when we had to jot down points in our diary for important appointment days. According to research by Statista, there are more than 6 billion smartphone users in the world. So here is another opportunity for you. You could embed a calendar file (.ics) inside the text message and then send personalized SMS to your clients. You could do that while sending the confirmation text so that when the appointment is due clients get automatically reminded by their phone calendar app.
Also read: Top 10 Best Cloud Storage Android Apps for smartphone
5. Backup Storage
A lot of people forget about their key appointment terms which are essential for the appointment to be conducted. So while sending the confirmation and its subsequent reminder message you can highlight the specific information which needs to be followed by the clients before they can start with their appointment. You have to repeatedly highlight the critical information in both the SMS as people tend to ignore and not always read the full text.
Conclusion
SMS is a cost-effective, scalable solution to this appointment cancellation or no-show problem. Many businesses have or are already switching over to SMS from traditional methods of reminding their clients. And now with great technological innovations, SMS can be fully automated thanks to artificial intelligence.
Leave a comment