Boost Your Bottom Line: Why Investing in Appointment Reminder Software Pays Off

Managing your business to maximize revenue and cut down on unneeded expenditures is one of the keys to success. To that end, you might wonder whether an appointment reminder software is a worthwhile purchase for your business. In this article, we'll offer a few reasons why you'll see a beneficial ROI from automated appointment reminders, and how you can easily integrate them into your workflow.

How Appointment Reminders Lead to Increased Revenue

Reduce No Shows & Last Minute Cancellations

Missed appointments are a costly phenomenon for any business. In the healthcare sector alone, studies have shown that no shows can account for more than $150 billion in costs a year. For a small business especially, a missed appointment leads to wasted time and lost money, which can impact already thin margins. Charging no shows a missed appointment fee can help recoup those costs, but may impact client relations and make customers hesitant to recommend your services to others. What can you do to limit lost revenue?

One of the most effective strategies for reducing missed appointments is implementing automated appointment reminders to keep customers informed of their appointment details. That way, they can make sure their upcoming appointment doesn't conflict with other scheduled engagements. These reminder messages are especially important if your business implements online scheduling. While booking an appointment on your website is easy for customers, they may forget to about their scheduled appointments. You can help them make it in for their scheduled services when you send appointment reminders.

Improve Your Administrative Efficiency

In the past, it was common to send manual reminders via post cards, or use phone calls to confirm appointment time and details with the client. While these methods work, they can take a lot of valuable time away from your administrative team. Often, their hands are full with other tasks, like managing client records, ensuring a stellar client experience in-office, and overseeing your existing calendar. Asking them to send reminders and make phone calls is putting extra demands on vital team members that keep your office running smoothly.

In some cases, this demand might be so great that you have to hire new staff members to accommodate the demand for phone calls and email reminders. Using automated appointment reminders is much more cost-efficient than hiring new staff, and it can relieve stress on your existing staff members, improving their quality of life and work satisfaction.

Part of what makes appointment reminders so easy to integrate into your workflow is that the service integrates with your existing online calendar, from popular options like Outlook and Google Calendar to custom built scheduling systems. Once you have the automated appointment reminders synced with your calendar, customized messages will automatically send at a designated frequency before scheduled appointments. This "set it and forget it" style of software saves your staff time and makes the process of client communication much easier.

Drive Customer Satisfaction & Business Growth

Cultivating a base of loyal, satisfied customers is a must if you want to see long-term, sustainable growth for your business. By providing timely appointment reminders, you're reducing the frustrating occurrences of no shows that can damage relations with clients. Your automated appointment reminders also create a seamless client journey that creates satisfied customers who will be happy to return, as well as recommend your offerings to others.

In the digital era, a positive online presence is also a must for reaching a broader customer base. Negative reviews, or no online presence at all, can lead potential customers to distrust your business and look elsewhere for the services they need.  Automated reminders aren't just for upcoming appointments--you can also use sms appointment reminders as a follow up to gather customer feedback. Those who are dissatisfied can be offered discounts or refunds to address their problems, while those who were pleased can be solicited for positive reviews on your business pages. These reviews can have a compounding effect. Once you've attracted a few, you'll have an easier time attracting new clients, who can leave reviews in turn.

Additionally, as mentioned above, fewer no shows means fewer times where you have to assess a missed appointment fee to a client, possibly damaging your relations with them. Just simple appointment reminder messages have so many downstream benefits, your business budget is bound to benefit in numerous ways.

Getting Started With Automated Appointment Reminders

Ready to see these benefits and more for your business? Here's your quick-start guide to implementing automated appointment reminders to save time and money. With just a brief learning curve, you'll see how these automated systems can improve your staff management, client relations, and more.

Find the Right Software

With lots of offerings on the market, it might be difficult to narrow down your choices and find a good fit for your company. However, there are a few features you should include as a must-have. Multi-channel communication is crucial in today's information-rich age--it's easier to reach clients if you can communicate via email, text, or phone calls, whatever they prefer. You should also find a service that supports two-way messaging to facilitate easy client communication. Lastly, make sure there's the option to customize your messaging so you can tailor messages based on your businesses tone of voice, appointment type, and more.

Integrate With Your Scheduling Software

The next step is to sync up your appointment reminder service with your Google Calendar or other scheduling platform. The software you pick should make it simple to connect the two, and offer clear, detailed instructions for doing so. Once you've connected the two, you'll be able to create automated appointment reminders with the click of a button.

Take Advantage of Customizable Templates

Appointment reminders may be automated, but they don't have to sound automatic or lifeless. After all, no one wants to feel like a number in a system, so take advantage of your software's customizable templates to infuse routine communications with a personable tone. You can do this by using the customer's name, adjusting the wording to match your company's branding, and including detailed information that communicates your care and attention for the client.

Enjoy the Benefits of Automated Appointment Reminders

With these steps in place, you're ready to send appointment reminders without putting extra burden on your employees. Just see how quickly these personalized reminders will pay for themselves as they reduce no shows, administrative strain, and customer dissatisfaction.

Start Sending Appointment Reminders With Reminderly

Ready for a reliable, easy to use appointment reminder service? Reminderly offers a full suite of tools to support your scheduling and customer communication, including customizable message templates, integration with most common scheduling platforms, waitlist functionality, two-way messaging, and much more. All of this, bundled into one straightforward interface. You can pick it up in no time. To see how you could make more money with appointment reminders, use our ROI calculator, or sign up for a free two-week trial today and see how easy reminders and follow ups can be.