The reminder knows which appointment it is
Different appointment types need different preparation and different notice. One generic message is what makes reminders easy to ignore.
No-shows
A booking nobody confirms is a coin flip
This is the one where the honest answer is most often 'your existing system already does it, go and switch it on'. Check that before you spend anything.
What actually happens
Nobody decided to let this happen.
The slot is booked, the day arrives, and nobody comes. The time cannot be resold at short notice, so it is simply gone — and in an appointment business a lost slot is close to pure lost margin, because the cost of being open was already paid.
The fix is genuinely well understood and mostly solved by software. Which is why the first thing worth doing here is not hiring anybody.
Work out your own number
What is this costing you?
The easiest number on this whole site to work out.
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1
No-shows and late cancellations in a typical month.
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2
The margin on one slot — not the revenue, the margin.
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3
Multiply. That is the size of the prize, and it is usually smaller than people fear and larger than they bother to act on.
Then check what your booking system already sends. A surprising number of practices are paying for reminders that were never enabled.
The honest version
Buy a tool, or build it?
Buy the tool if
- You have a booking or practice-management system — it almost certainly has reminders, and switching them on costs nothing.
- Your appointments are uniform and a standard reminder fits all of them.
- You do not need the reminder to know anything your booking system does not already know.
Build it if
- The reminder needs to say different things for different appointment types, and your system only sends one message.
- What happens after the reminder matters — filling the gap, rebooking, flagging repeat no-shows — and none of that is in the product.
- Booking lives in one place and the customer record in another, and the two do not talk.
- You want the same machinery to handle the neglected half of this: asking past customers back.
Of everything on this site, this is the workflow most likely to need no work from me at all. Go and look at your booking system's settings first. If reminders are in there and switched off, that is your afternoon sorted and you have kept your money.
If it is the second one
What a build actually has to do
What happens when someone cancels
The valuable half and the half products rarely cover: a freed slot that gets offered to somebody rather than sitting empty.
The reactivation nobody has time for
Same machinery, pointed at people who came once and did not come back. Only worth building if you can say what a returning customer is worth — and if you cannot, working that out is the first job, and it is not an automation job.
When to leave this alone
Do not build this yet if…
If your no-show rate is already low, or your booking system's built-in reminders would cover it, do not build anything. This is the workflow I most often talk people out of.
The part most people worry about
Nothing gets authority by accident.
Every workflow I build has a setting for how much it is allowed to do on its own, and you pick it per workflow rather than once for the whole business.
It drafts, you send
The system does the assembling and the remembering. A person reads it and presses the button. Where most work should start, and where a lot of it should stay.
It runs, you get told
It acts on the rules you agreed and reports what it did. Suitable once a workflow has proven itself and the cost of a wrong move is small.
It runs, you can stop it
Fully hands-off with a switch you own and a record of every action. Appropriate for high-volume, low-judgement work, and not much else.
Straight answers
Questions this one always raises
Is this not just text message reminders?
The reminder is the easy part and your booking system probably already sends it. If a build makes sense here it is for the parts around it — filling cancelled slots, handling different appointment types, bringing past customers back. If all you need is the reminder, you do not need me.
How do we avoid annoying people?
Frequency and relevance, both decided by you before anything is built, and a hard stop the moment somebody asks to be left alone. Any system that cannot honour an opt-out immediately should not be sending on your behalf at all.
Where this comes up
Most common in these areas
Not a rule, just where I see it most. I work across south and east King County.
Start at the bottom of the staircase
Sixty seconds, and you will know whether this is worth another minute.
No account, no calendar, no waiting for a reply. Run the Fit Check and you get the read on your own screen. If it says the work is worth mapping, the next step is a free 20-minute call. If it says leave it alone, you have lost a minute and I have lost a customer I should not have had.
Or just write to me: bryan@perseidechocreations.com · or call 425-243-3473