Medical offices around the world know how important it is to make scheduling appointments a priority. Even more so, they know how frustrating it is to experience missed or no-show appointments. But when utilizing SMS messaging, it’s easy to decrease the occurrence of missed appointments and to schedule more appointments. Text messages are especially useful for appointment reminders because, unlike emails, text messages are usually opened within five minutes of being received.
SMS mobile marketing is widely used as a way of improving communication between doctors and patients where Information can be sent swiftly and directly to the patients’ mobile phones, and read immediately. SMS marketing solutions are easy to use and remarkably cost-effective when compared to phone calls, and it is also a simple way to reach out to clients and can be used to improve your customer service, no matter how many or few people work for your company.
Missed appointments are a waste of money and make the health service less efficient, due to longer waiting times. A letter or phone call to remind patients of check-ups and appointments are costly and time-consuming. By using the EbulkSMS platform, you can schedule texts for the whole week, which are then sent automatically on the day of the appointment.
Our SMS platform also offers a two-way communication between the patients and the doctor; building the communication and trust bond between them, keeping track of the appointments, and a cancellation if necessary thereby letting you offer the slot to another patient. You can also send SMS healthcare, SMS doctors’ surgeries, SMS pharmacy and SMS hospitals messages for:
- Test/appointment memos.
- Check-up memos (e.g. dental appointments).
- Vaccination memos.
In a study conducted recently, 41% of patients said they would prefer a text reminder, as opposed to 1.3% who preferred a phone call. An average doctor’s office will pay their staff over Three Million Naira (N3, 000,000) for six months for manual phone reminder (calls). Of phone call reminders placed, around 16% of them are never received. However, with SMS messaging, 98% are opened and read.
Before offices can send messages they must first build a subscriber list, and the easiest way to do this is, is with an opt-in keyword. However this assumes that you already have a list of customers prepared. Once you have prepared your list of numbers you are ready to reach out to your customers. After your patients opt-in, you can then send them relevant messages, making it simple to convert patients to the new system.
Reduce the possibility that your patients will be late or will miss their appointment, complicating your schedule and affecting other patients' appointments. As they say, getting there is half the battle. Now that you have the information and reasoning, it’s time to develop a successful SMS reminder campaign.