• Choosing an SMS Appointment Reminder Service
• How Effective are SMS appointment Reminders?
• When to send SMS Reminders

Choosing an SMS Appointment Reminder Service.

(This is the full version of this article. The brief version is here.)

If you are looking for an appointment reminder service you are probably faced with the question of “Which service is best for me, and how do I tell?”

Price.

Everyone thinks they want to consider price, but if you think about it for long enough and carefully enough, you’ll realise that the important outcome is more money in your pocket at the end of the working week. What’s better in your opinion…spending $1 and getting $10 benefit, or spending $2 and getting $30 benefit?? When you look at the prices charged for SMS reminders, there is not a large variation – perhaps from 10c to 25c per message. But the variation in what you get for your money is much greater. Price does not seem to be an indicator of features and quality, so you should probably look at the features being offered first, and then compare prices of the services which have the features you require.

Personalization of the messages.

Personalisation of SMS messages comes in various forms. In researching for this article I came across SMS services which:

• offered a single SMS message with automatically inserted appointment date and time
• offered one message for each practitioner
• allowed complete personalisation, by asking the user to enter or adjust the message for every appointment
• allowed templated messages to be personalised with the recipient’s name
• allowed templated messages to be personalised with the recipient’s given name, family name, title, subject of the appointment (eg for a child), and could even use text and insert the appointment time and date based on the recipient’s preferred language.

Why would you you want to personalise the message? Let’s start with why you are sending the message in the first place. At first thought you would probably say that you are sending the message for your own benefit. But would your client want to see it that way? If you send a personalised message to your client, they will feel that you have sent it for their benefit. That will give them positive feelings towards you and the services you provide. They will be more likely to turn up for their appointment and even to book another. You provide a benefit to your clients, and subsequent benefits will flow to you. There is a whole business organisation based on this principle that “Givers Gain”. It’s called BNI. It’s the world’s largest business referral organisation. See www.bni.com for more information.

Integration with a practice management system.

If you have a practice management system then it would seem to be the obvious choice that you should utilise the system’s own SMS reminder module. Check the features to see if your practice management system’s own reminder module meets your requirements. There may be additional costs to add the module, and the message cost may or may not be competitive. The best value of the integrated solution is that there is little additional work involved in scheduling the SMS messages, particularly important if you reschedule an appointment – you want the reminder to be adjusted accordingly.

Reply handling

Replies to the reminder messages can be handled in a number of ways.

• No replies possible – the reminder SMS is sent with a message-centre phone number which discards any replies. If this is the case, you need to put your own contact number in the message, so clients can ring to cancel or change an appointment.
• SMS replies to your mobile number - the reminder SMS is sent with your own mobile number as the sender, so replies will go to your mobile phone. You could have an office mobile dedicated to the purpose if you required.
• SMS replies are converted to e-mail and e-mailed to you.
• Replies handled by Interactive Voice Response – for when your client calls the sending number, or the contact number in the message text.
• Replies are directed to a call centre where an operator takes a cancellation or change request and e-mails the message to you.

Software

There are 6 main ways SMS reminder systems are implemented. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages.

• Integrated with a practice management system
  • If you have a practice management system, there is probably only one appointment reminder system available for it, from the original supplier. It may have all the features you require, or there may be some missing.
• Using MS Outlook Calendar with e-mailed invitations.
  • This system is simple for the service provider to implement, so they can offer services cheaply, because they do not have to cover the cost of developing a customised user interface.
  • e-mailed invitations from Outlook have limited scope for customisation and personalisation, and you need to enter the client’s mobile telephone number as a specially formatted e-mail address. The e-mails are converted to SMS and sent at the correct time by the SMS service provider.
• Using MS Outlook Calendar with a customised plug-in module
  • A customised plug-in is a small program which adds extra functionality to MS Outlook.
  • A system using this message provides a more friendly user interface which is appropriate to your needs for sending SMS reminders.
• Online appointment diary using simple web pages
  • Simple web-based systems are quick for the developer to write, but can suffer from slowness when entering data, due to web page reloads etc.
  • When the apppointment diary is online, it can be accessed from any Internet connected computer, including laptops, netbooks and smart-phones.
• Online appointment diary using a program running inside a web browser
  • These systems are more sophisticated than simple web pages, and should be easier for you to use. There are fewer delays in loading web pages, because most of the action happens inside your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc), and should provide facilities like “suggest as you type” interaction.
• Standalone software application which is installed on your computer.
  • Like MS-Outlook, these systems are installed on your computer, and all the information is stored there. Some require your computer to be on so that the software can send the SMS messages; some will send the list of messages to the service provider’s computers for sending at the appropriate time.
  • Given that the application has been written specifically for entering appointments with reminders, the application should be easy to use.

One important consideration is whether the appointment diary and reminder schedule is kept on your computer, or on your reminder provider’s servers. If it is on your computer, make sure you keep it well backed up, by copying all of the important data to a USB flash drive each night.

If the data is kept on your service provider’s server, they should be taking care of backups, by using duplicated redundant hard disk systems, and regular system backups (possibly more than once per day).

The downside of an online appointment diary is that if your Internet connection stops working, you might not have access to your diary! Some online providers will e-mail you a list of your appointments for the next day. If you receive those e-mails, you won’t be left stranded wondering who is going to walk in the door while your Internet connection is down.

Ease of Use and setup

The ease of use for a reminder service is probably the most critical. If a service is hard to use, or does not allow you to do what you want, then it really does not matter how much cash you give to your service provider – it is expensive in terms of time and effort versus results.

Here is an example of what I mean.

The easiest to use service I found in my review simply required the entry of a mobile phone number into a timeslot in an online appointment diary. Very simple.

But because it only accepts a mobile number, the user has to separately look up each mobile number from a hard-copy address book, or a different computer program, and then transfer the information to the reminder diary. There is no client contact list in the reminder diary. If a client reschedules their appointment, the user has to reschedule in the online reminder diary based on the mobile phone number, not the client name.

Further, because this service does not know the name of each client, it can only send an impersonal reminder message.

So while this particular reminder service is simple to use, there is a lot of background work outside the application which you, the user, would have to do.

What to assess for ease of use

• Adding a new appointment for a new client – this likely to be the hardest thing to do, because you have to add a new client to the contact manager (if there is one) as well as creating a new appointment for them.
• Adding a new appointment for an existing client – how easy is it to search for an existing client when adding a new appointment.
• Changing an existing appointment to a new time
  • in some systems you can drag-and-drop the appointment.
  • some systems allow you to simply open the appointment and change the time
  • some will require you to delete the unwanted appointment and create a new one.

Documentation

Unless the system is trivially simple, you’ll probably need documentation to get the most out of it, especially if it is rich with configurable features. The documentation should be available either before you sign up, or during a free trial period. Make sure you look at the documentation provided and ensure that it is thorough and easy to understand. If there are training videos available, even better.

Multiple language support

There are two reasons to consider how well a reminder service handles multiple languages.

1. If the service provider is not from your country, does their system handle your language well enough? If you are in the UK or New Zealand, you will need to check that the USA provider you are considering does allow the sending of dates in day/month format, and not just month/day.

If you are in France, your clients will probably want to see times displayed as 14h30 instead of 2:30pm

2. Doing better by your clients, by communicating with them in their own language.

Recall what I said at the start of this article. Sending reminder SMS messages is for the benefit of your clients. If you live in a country where there is a single official language, you might not have thought about sending messages in other languages. It is obvious that for countries like Canada and Belgium, supporting French and English, or French and Flemish/Dutch is imperative, but what about countries with large minorities like Australia and the USA. In California, being able to send messages in Spanish as well as English is important. So you might want to think about the ability to send messages in multiple languages even if you don’t speak that language.

There is at least one SMS reminder service which allows you to send different messages to different clients, and to specify the language of the message. It won’t translate messages for you, but it will insert the date and time using the translated versions of the day and month names. If you want to send Spanish reminders, and you don’t speak Spanish yourself, you simply ask someone to translate the English reminder message, and enter it into the system with a name like “Spanish-SMS”. When you create the Spanish-SMS message, you mark it as being in Spanish. Then, when you create an appointment for a Spanish-speaking client, you can select the “Spanish-SMS” message for them. When the message is sent, the system automatically inserts “lunes, 22 de febrero de 2010, 14:30″ into the message instead of “Mon Feb 22 2010, 2:30pm”

Multiple Message Support

Have you given consideration to when you should send a reminder message to your clients? 24 hours before the appointment? 48 hours? What about multiple messages….? If you make appointments weeks or months in advance, you might want to send multiple messages. In the extreme case, a medical oncologist who sees many patients one every six months for a review consultation would perhaps send an e-mail 1 month prior, an SMS 10 days prior and another SMS 1 day prior, just to make absolutely sure that the patient is given every opportunity to not miss the appointment. For a medical oncologist, the appointment is very valuable in income terms,. For the patient, it can be very difficult to arrange a suitable replacement appointment time when the oncologist is booked solid for weeks into the future.

Again, multiple messages at appropriate times prior to the appointment is a benefit to the client.

Not all reminder systems support multiple messages, or multiple modes of delivery of messages (SMS, e-mail, voice call). Think about what sort of reminder service you want to provide to your clients, and whether multiple messages is what you want.

Multiple Types of Message

Most people have mobile telephones these days, but some, especially the elderly, either don’t have them, or don’t use them very much. An older client might keep her mobile turned off, so sending an SMS one day prior to the appointment might not work. She might be an avid e-mailer because she keeps in contact with her son who lives in another country. My own mother-in-law falls into this category exactly. For her, an e-mail reminder is more effective than an SMS. My mother, however, uses neither e-mail nor mobiles well, so a voice call to her home is more reliable.

Ensure that the reminder service you choose can support multiple types of message delivery. For voice reminder calls, some service providers will offer voice calls from a call centre, IVR calls from an automated system and others will e-mail you a list of people who need a voice call instead of SMS or e-mail.

Group reminder messages

A facility not seen in many SMS reminder offerings is the ability to send a reminder to more than one person attending an appointment. This is likely to be important if you have more than one adult attending an appointment, such as a relationship counselling session. The reminder can be sent to all attendees in a group.

Post-Appointment messages

A facility which is probably only available from the providers who can send multiple messages per appointment is the facility to send messages at a preset time after an appointment. Post-appointment messages can be used to say “Thank you for your custom” or even for next-appointment recalls, such as a 6-monthly checkup at the dentist or car workshop. This is a great facility to boost the return customer rate, if used appropriately. Consider whether your business could benefit from post-appointment messages and check to see if the service is offered.

Ad Hoc messages

With ad hoc messages you can send any text messages to any mobile number, not just a specific reminder to an appointment. Ad hoc messages can be used to inform specific clients or groups of clients of a special offer, or of session cancellations due to unforseen circumstances. However, if you do suddenly have to cancel all appointments for an afternoon or the next day, you would probably want to telephone all your clients, just to make sure the message has got through in time.

Conclusion

There is a growing number of SMS reminder providers in local and international markets, all with slightly different facilities and approaches to providing you and your clients with the messages you need. When choosing a provider, choose one which is right for you, and don’t just choose on price alone.