As a business owner I use automation for reminding clients of upcoming appointments. It had gotten out of hand after a certain period of time. It got to the point where people would wait till the last minute to cancel their appointments or allegedly forget about their appointments entirely.
My immediate solution to this problem was to pay an additional $25 per month to send out text message reminders to clients. I felt as though this was going to make things better. The client would be receiving an email reminder 24 hours prior to the appointment as well as a text message reminder approximately 12 hours prior to the appointment. Boy was I wrong.
Here I was paying $300 a year to threaten clients with a $35 no-show fee by way of text message reminder and they were still missing appointments. That's because they didn't take the appointment seriously. It was the imposing of fees and deposits that forced the client to value my time. You see, they valued their money more than they valued my time. If I have something that's extremely important to me I'm going to make my own reminders.
For example I know every Saturday I'm normally at work at 7:00 a.m. I'm going to have three separate alarms set just in case the first one fails. Now no one is perfect. I'm referencing people who either consistently don't show up or do this no-show act on the very first occasion. First impressions are everything. When I have a client who doesn't know show no call on the first day it's indicative of a horrible first impression.
