Impact of No Shows on Service Businesses & the Role of Technology

No-shows or missed appointments hit service based businesses badly. For the healthcare segment, it means lost revenue and patient outcomes that are less than satisfactory. Over the years, patients have not improved on this behavior of cancelling appointments at the last minute. Recent studies prove the patient no shows range between 20–25%. No-shows and last-minute cancellations have always been an issue, but more so after the pandemic.

Opportunity Cost

Cancellations and missed appointments divert resources that could have been directed to provide better service and outcome. They create an opportunity vacuum, robbing businesses of the chance to interact with customers.

Customer Acquisition Costs

The cost of new customer acquisition is five times that of customer retention. Engaging an existing customer is the best way to maximize overall revenue and profits for your business.

Revenue Loss

As per a recent report, businesses with over $120,000 yearly revenue can lose over $26,000 each year due to missed appointments. This is more than a quarter of the overall revenue for such businesses. Another statistic from a dental publication says that “If a practice loses one appointment each day for a year, the lost production would be in the range of $20,000 to $70,000.”

An NCBI report quotes that 67,000 no-shows can cost the healthcare system approximately $7 million. Such costs may be even much higher in some settings, such as radiology departments, where resources, such as X-Ray and MRI machines are awfully expensive, and underutilization may cause huge financial constraints to the healthcare organizations.

(*Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7280239/)

Patient Outcome

Missing hair and salon appointments may not lead to health issues, but missing a lab test or a physician appointment can be problematic. A mammography/ radiology/ blood test are probably too important to be missed and delay diagnosis, leading to pronounced ill-health, loss of quality of life / individual productivity and damage to life at worst.

Losing Time

If the customer is using phone calls to fix appointments (an average call like this can last up to 3 minutes) and this happens every 10 minutes, it is equivalent to wasting nearly 3 hours of the front office clerk’s time every day. Also, remember that due to some reason or the other, not all calls get connected in the first attempt. Unfortunately, if the appointment is postponed/ cancelled, the time spent on this in addition to the rescheduling is also to be considered.

Role of Technology

In the presence of a smart system to facilitate self-appointments, handle cancellations, follow up with people and reschedule appointments, the above-mentioned challenges can be effectively resolved. Such automation need not be expensive or a hassle. They can also be free, but without the many extra service features to catapult your business on the growth trajectory. These features can be as simple as integration to social media and payment gateways, and more value-adding ones such as follow-up/ reminders, self-cancellations and re-scheduling options.

Enhancing Revenue

Online booking systems with additional features can easily offer self-booking for your clients and provide reminders/ follow up through various channels including e-mails & app notifications. They can also create follow up alerts through chat apps and social media. In short, such systems effectively engage with customers to enhance the bottom-line. Revenue can be boosted using offers through the above-mentioned channels.

Time Savings

An online booking system can save time for your customers as they are automated and often have simple interfaces. The reception staff save time as they do not have to spend time on calls. All messages are auto sent.

Digital Marketing for Promotion & Engagement

Automated booking solutions send out engaging mails and offers that keep customers in the know about your services. This will help them to be confident and in touch, preventing or reducing missed appointments to a greater degree than before. These notifications are also less intrusive than phone calls by humans and therefore likely to be preferred more.

Close Revenue Gaps

Online bookings are often pre-paid, and this will help prevent revenue losses due to cancellations/ no-shows. Often, such bookings are avoided by those less serious about appointments, and this saves both parties’ time.

Empowering through Social Media Integration

Because such booking tools are often linked to social media, bookings can also be done via blogs or other marketing content.

Simplification via Self-booking

Most of us prefer to WhatsApp others or use chat. Though habituated to picking up a phone to dial a booking, we are likely to prefer the freedom of booking online once accustomed. Online booking is 24/7, as opposed to traditional phone-based appointments. Once this happens, the rest is managed by the automation software that sets reminders and follows up for cancellations and rescheduling efforts.

Eliminating Manual Errors

Online booking and scheduling software can help reduce human errors caused by overlooking matters. This saves reputation, customer time and the effort to straighten things out.

Insight into Customer Behavior

Online booking systems generate data and reports helpful for business such as the overall bookings, revenue generation, cost savings per saved appointments, revenue generation per customer and so on. It also points out who tends to cancel bookings at the last minute and who is more consistent in keeping their appointments on time, thereby allowing you to plan out personalized engagement strategies for rewarding loyalty and prevent attrition.

The Risk in Allowing No Shows to Continue

If they are not doing anything practical to reduce no-shows or manage cancellations and fill lost appointment slots, businesses might be taking a big risk; one of leaving survival to fate. Another area where cancellations cost businesses is when the appointment is not effectively re-scheduled. However, the this can again materialize at the expense of time and money.

iSchedul

Terveys Technologies has built a unique and smart online appointment scheduling system called iSchedul. iSchedul is backed by unique features such as provision for video consultation before actual appointment setting and surveys for gauging customer issues. In post-pandemic era, such pre-evaluations can avoid unnecessary face to face meetings in a highly susceptible environment such as a salon/ healthcare clinic.

iSchedul has the capability to identify customer trends and behavior patterns, thus prompting the system to push alerts through multiple touch points. This saves revenue and time for your business up to the tune of 30%. If a missed appointment costs your business approximately 100–400 USD in one-time charges, and assuming that there are 10 missed appointments each month, this may result in savings of roughly USD 36,000- 50,000 per year.

Want to know more about how iSchedul can catapult your business into the next level? Call/ write to us for a demo session today: support@ischedul.com