Why Appointment Reminder Texts are Crucial for Success
If your practice doesn’t currently have an automatic patient reminder system in place, how many patients miss appointments in an average week? Not only are you losing the revenue from the missed appointments, but you are also losing time. If a patient lets you know within a reasonable time period that they can’t make their appointment, your staff can likely fill that spot with a patient who wants treatment as soon as possible, but had to wait for an appointment. Chiropractors who don’t use appointment reminder texts or emails have a missed appointment rate between 16 and 18 percent, and when you start doing the math on how much revenue you are losing from no shows, the cumulative effects are staggering. Time is the most precious commodity of all, and once it is gone, it is not replaceable. When you start using appointment reminder software, you’ll soon notice a dramatic difference in your level of missed appointments, and wish you had taken advantage of such software earlier. You should also see improvement in your compliancy ratings and better communication overall between you, your patients, and staff.
Beyond Appointment Reminder Texts
A text message reminder performs a great service, but you want something that goes beyond just letting the patient know they’re due to come in for treatment the next day. The right appointment reminder service for your practice can also help build a sense of community for your patients, keeping them loyal and increasing the odds of those critical patient referrals. Look for a text reminder service with flexible components, so you can use it to wish patients a happy birthday, congratulate them on a special event such as a wedding or graduation, or anything else that puts your practice in a caring and favorable light.
For birthdays, you might offer your patients a lagniappe – that’s a small gift given to a customer, or patient, by a merchant or service provider. A good example of a chiropractic birthday lagniappe is a coupon redeemable for a free product, such as pillow or exercise tool, which the patient can use or give to a friend. That’s an especially good way to entice an inactive patient back into your office or attract new referrals. The possibilities for these functions is endless, and is limited only by the marketing imagination of you and your staff.
You can send email notices, like a monthly newsletter, to patients to engage, educate, and keep them abreast of community events you’ll attend, seminars, new products and any sort of news and information you want to share with your patient community.
Appointment Reminder Software
When it comes to a text reminder service, everything depends on quality appointment reminder software. ChiroTouch’s appointment reminder service called CTInTouch allows you to send texts or emails based on patient preference. Because the reminders are automatically integrated into the software’s patient scheduling, there’s nothing you or your staff have to do once the patient is entered into the system, and that makes your daily, weekly, and monthly appointment scheduling as easy as possible.
ChiroTouch offers not only state-of-the-art appointment reminder software, but our products contain features to help you with your chiropractic marketing strategies. Call us today and find out how ChiroTouch improves your practice by scheduling a demo. Or to add CTInTouch to your current ChiroTouch service, call 800-852-1771 option 2, or email insidesales@chirotouch.com.