Timely pre-appointment reminders by text or email help owners with critical visit information and give them the opportunity to reschedule if necessary, reducing missed appointments. Sending out friendly but informative reminders can help manage owner expectations and set up the visit for success.
Some benefits
- Automating appointment reminders reduces manual tasks for the busy admin team
- Decreases missed appointments
- Improves owner compliance with bringing essential paperwork, samples etc.
- May reduce inbound calls
- Provides a more proactive approach than manual processes may allow
- Impresses owners with useful, trustworthy communications, potentially helping with loyalty and referrals
- Enables notifications to be sent both by text and email
Sending appointment reminders by email is good. Sending reminders via text is better – it is said text messages get a 99% open rate. Sending them both ways is best. Eclipse now makes it easy to automate pre-appointment reminders that can be sent via both email and text.
And you can now easily add templates for SMS (no reply) and email (client can reply). Some of the merge tags available in the message section for template creation:
- <ReminderCreated>some text at <D> more text</ReminderCreated> for just created events in the Diary Event when Send on Create is active (Figure 3)
- <ReminderChanged>some text at <D> more text</ ReminderChanged> for changed time or date in the Diary Event
- <ReminderAuto>some text at <D> more text</ ReminderAuto> for the regular reminder
- <D>, <T> and <D: DDD MMMM YYYY> for date and time
- <A> for a single animal or <A: (|)> for the first 10 animals
Notes to bear in mind
- Eclipse always waits 10 minutes before it sends any reminder after a Diary Event has been created
- Sent reminders are recorded in the client history in case you need to check
- Scheduled reminders can be re-sent if needed
- Clients can have an overall preference set for no appointment reminders if they wish
If your practice is interested in adding this new feature to your Eclipse system, please call us.