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Reduce Appointment No-Shows with Appointment Reminders
Reduce Appointment No-Shows with Appointment Reminders

Schedule appointment reminders to your clients with MessageDesk.

Josh avatar
Written by Josh
Updated over a week ago

No-show appointments and last-minute cancellations are frustrating. Every customer who no-shows puts a gap in your daily schedule - wasting time, hurting revenue, and affecting your bottom line.

Why do customers, clients, and patients miss appointments?

Miscommunication.

We’ve found that 53% of people say they simply forget to attend or cancel their appointments. While another 28% say they miss their appointments simply because they write down the wrong date or time.

This is where MessageDesk comes in - quickly schedule appointment reminders to your clients so they never miss another appointment again.

This article is part of a series where I cover the above image. This article goes over the "Schedule Reminders & Manage Jobs" section of the above.


Table of Contents

In this article, I'll cover 3 ways MessageDesk can help you reduce your no-shows.


Scheduling Appointment Reminder from a Shared Inbox

With MessageDesk, you and your team can schedule texts to clients from a single shared inbox.

From within the Inbox, your team can schedule messages. These are great for scheduling appointment reminders.

If you find yourself sending a lot of appointment reminders, it may be wise to create an appointment reminder template. This way you can pull it into any conversation without having to retype it.

Automating Cancellation and Reschedule Request

Once you start sending appointment reminders, it's likely that some clients will request to reschedule or cancel their event.

With MessageDesk, expedite these requests by setting up keyword automation for the words "Confirm", "Reschedule" or "Cancel"

Once you set up your different autoresponders, you can filter your inbox based on what autoresponder your clients replied to. i.e. See all your confirmed, canceled, and reschedule requests in an organized fashion:

Automate Appointment Reminders by Integrating a Calendar Tool

At this point, you're probably wondering how to automate the initial reminder getting sent/scheduled.

This is where a calendar integration and appointment scheduling tool come into play.

By default, MessageDesk doesn't actually schedule appointments for you. Instead, you'll need a calendar scheduling tool like Calendly or simplymeet.me.

Don't worry though, you can connect these tools to MessageDesk so they trigger an automatic appointment reminder text from your business phone line.

To do so, just connect your scheduling tool to MessageDesk via Zapier - a third-party integrations tool that makes it easy to combine 2 apps into a single workflow.

With Zapier you can accomplish automations like the one I've pictured below:


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