Appointment Scheduling and Reminder Automation
A schedule that fills itself and keeps itself full. Booking from your site and your messages, reminders that cut no-shows, and a waitlist that refills a cancellation before you have noticed, for businesses across metro Detroit and Michigan.
Talk to usIn short
Booking from every channel into the calendar your Michigan business already runs, reminders customers can answer, and a cancellation refilled from the waitlist before the desk has looked up.
- One calendar, every channel
- Two-way reminders, in your words
- The waitlist texted the moment a slot opens
- No-shows offered the next opening within the hour
Why reminders are half the answer
The no-show is not the loss. The empty hour after it is.
Across 105 studies, roughly one appointment in four is missed. Automated reminders remove about a third of that. Which leaves two thirds of it, and every one of those is an hour a business paid for and could not sell.
So we build the reminders, and then the part most systems stop short of: when a slot opens, the waitlist is texted in the order you set, the first yes takes it, and the schedule closes back up. The customer who missed gets the next opening within the hour. The desk sees a full day, not a list of holes.
Illustrative. Who is on the waitlist, and who is texted first, is set by the practice.
- 23%
- average no-show rate across 105 studies of appointment scheduling
- 34%
- of that no-show rate removed by automated reminders, across 29 studies
No-shows: Dantas, Fleck, Cyrino Oliveira and Hamacher, Health Policy, 2018. Reminders: Hasvold and Wootton, Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 2011.
In the work
Booking, reminders, backfill, recovery
Booking from anywhere
Your website, a text, a direct message, a call to the desk. Every one lands in the same calendar with the right duration, the right staff member and the right room, so a booking made at 11 at night is as correct as one made across the counter.
Confirmations and reminders
By text, at the intervals you choose, in your words, and two-way: reply to confirm, reply to move it. A reminder a customer cannot answer is a notice, not a reminder.
The waitlist that fills the gap
When someone cancels, the waitlist is texted in the order you set and the first yes takes the slot. The desk sees a full afternoon in the morning queue, not a hole to work.
No-show recovery
A missed appointment gets a text within the hour with the next openings, not a note in a file. Most no-shows rebook if the rebooking is one tap.
The right slot every time
Service durations, buffers, who does what, which room, what needs a deposit. The rules of your schedule, written down once, so the system never books a two-hour colour into a thirty-minute gap.
Your calendar stays the record
It is built into the calendar or practice system you already run, through that system's own integration. Nothing is copied to a second calendar for anyone to keep in step.
Getting there
Map, write the cadence, connect, set the waitlist, run
- 01
Map the schedule
Services, durations, staff, rooms, buffers, deposits. The rules of a day at your business, written down for the first time.
- 02
Write the cadence
When the confirmation goes, when the reminders go, what they say, what happens on a no reply. Yours, not a default.
- 03
Connect the calendar
The system you already run, through its own integration. Bookings from every channel land in it, and it stays the one place the day lives.
- 04
Build the waitlist rules
Who goes on it, in what order, how many are texted at once, and what happens when two say yes. The difference between a backfill and a double booking.
- 05
Run it
Monitored, repaired when the calendar vendor changes something, reported monthly: bookings by channel, no-shows, slots refilled.
Fitted work
What comes up here, specifically
The winter gap
January across metro Detroit is a month of same-day cancellations. A waitlist texted the moment a slot opens, in the order you set, turns a snow day into a full afternoon instead of an empty one.
The hygiene chair
For a dental practice, an empty hygiene slot is the most expensive gap on the schedule when hygienist hours are the scarcest thing in the building. Reminders and backfill aimed at those slots first.
The estimate visit
A roofer or an HVAC contractor books estimates between jobs and loses a third of them to no-shows nobody chased. A confirmation the night before and a reminder an hour out, with the truck's arrival window, and the afternoon holds.
Saturday morning at the salon
The busiest hours of a metro Detroit salon are the ones a cancellation hurts most. The waitlist is where the regulars who wanted Saturday already are, and the slot is theirs before the desk has hung up.
Right time when
When this is worth doing
A good fit
- You run on a schedule and a no-show costs you an hour you cannot resell
- Reminders go out but nobody works the gaps they leave
- Customers book by text, by message and by phone and it lands in three places
- You have a waitlist in someone's head
Not a fit
- Walk-in only, with nothing to book
- One person, one chair, ten regulars, in which case a paper book is fine
- You want a second calendar rather than the one you have made to work
Scope
What we do not build
Double-book
The rules of your schedule are the system's constraints. It will leave a slot empty before it puts two customers in it, and it tells you when a rule would have been broken.
Reminders nobody can answer
Every reminder is two-way. A customer who replies to move an appointment gets moved, not told to call the office during business hours.
Nag
The cadence is yours, and it stops the moment the customer replies. A reminder that arrives after the customer confirmed is how a business gets muted.
Reasonable to ask
Before you commission it
Does it replace our booking software?
No. It is built into the calendar or practice system you already run, through that system's own integration, and adds the parts most of them lack: booking from every channel, two-way reminders, the waitlist and the no-show recovery. We do not name vendors until we have connected one for a client.
Does it work for a medical or dental practice?
Yes, and it was built for one first. Patient information is handled under a Business Associate Agreement, reminders say only what a reminder needs to say, and the rules about what the system may write to the chart are the practice's.
Can customers reschedule by text?
Yes. A reply to a reminder moves the appointment, offers the next openings, or cancels it, and the slot goes to the waitlist. A customer never has to call to change a booking made by text.
How many reminders go out?
As many as you set, typically a confirmation at booking, one the day before and one an hour out, and none after the customer replies. The cadence is written with you, not picked from a default.
We have several staff and rooms. Does it cope?
Yes. Who does what, how long it takes, which room it needs and what buffer follows it are the rules the system books against. A single-chair studio and a six-operatory practice run on the same system with different rules.
Count last month's no-shows.
Tell us the number, the calendar you run and how the desk handles a cancellation today. We will tell you what the reminders and the waitlist would have recovered, and what it takes to build them into what you have.
Talk to us