For the average person, an appointment is just another task out of the many in a crowded day and busy week, but for businesses — be it a health clinic or a hair salon — appointments are money. Appointments are time, which is also money. Appointments are the essence of how the entire operation functions.
For a customer, the worst a missed appointment can mean is the headache of having to set up another one. For a business, though, a whole day’s schedule can be thrown off. There are the costs of preparing for the appointment — in a doctor’s office, these can amount to as much as $150 per appointment — and then the broader operational costs of missing out on the other client who would have shown up, of keeping standby clients waiting unnecessarily, of wasting time and energy trying to track down a no-show and rework the rest of the calendar. When you consider that some businesses run no-show rates as high as 50%, it’s easy to see why businesses lose millions of dollars annually over poor logistics.
Now there’s a mobile solution looking to change all that. Screenpush’s Notifly is an automated calendar service that sends automatic reminders to clients regarding upcomign appointments, and let’s scheduling managers anticipate and work around no-shows.
The reminder comes via text message, which is more likely to be read, and read quickly, than email or snail mail, and more likely to elicit a response. An easy, one-button “yes or no” feature lets clients indicate whether they will be holding their appointment or not, and an intuitive color-coded schedule gives managers an ability to track the status of reminders and adjust appointment calendars on-the-go.
Notifly has already been proven to reduce no-show rates by as much as 65%, meaning the software pays for itself almost immediately. As CEO Josh Otten says, Notifly is a “ a smooth and effective solution at a low cost” that will “improve everything about how a business functions.” Whether you’re the average person missing appointments out of carelessness or an overbooked schedule, or the business owner dealing with the costs of it, it’s hard to see the downside.
