As a small business owner your customers may come to your workplace for their appointments. During the day your customers come and go, but some of your customers never actually show up.
This may sound familiar to you, and you would most certainly not be the only one. Entrepreneurs lose substantial revenue annually when customers fail to make their appointments and sending reminders manually can be time-consuming and ineffective.
“No-shows” are frustrating and costly for any business owner who works with appointments. Of course, sometimes it cannot be avoided because of factors beyond the control of your customer. But many times people forget their appointment or forget to cancel. You could send them a bill anyway, but not every customer will appreciate that and may not come back. Instead, it is far more beneficial to ensure your customers show up. And there are a lot of ways to boost your customer’s attendance.
Growing your small business is not an easy feat and requires a large amount of perseverance and dedication. Knowing your customers better and using simple revenue growth strategies can go a long way in increasing your business revenue. In this blog post, you will discover smart ways to implement revenue growth tactics with SuperSaaS.
1. Increase Customer attendance with reminders
Research by Getapp has shown that reminders can do wonders for your customer attendance, and up to 60% of customers say they would be less likely to miss appointments if they received reminders.
SuperSaaS offers a fully automated and customizable method of sending reminders via text and email.
Do you want to send your customers an email the day before and a text two hours before their appointment? No problem, you only have to set it up once and your reminders will routinely be sent out.
With a combination of email and SMS reminders, the chances of the recipient seeing your reminder increase greatly.
2. Send no-shows a follow-up message
Sending a “we are sorry we missed you” message to customers that did not show up is not about telling them off (although for some of us that can be more than a little satisfying).
Instead, you should send these follow-up messages to make sure your customers want to reschedule their appointment. Send the link to your online schedule and give them the opportunity to make a new booking.
Alternatively, you can also send customers that showed up a “Thank You” message to improve your customer retention.
3. Ask customers to prepay for their appointment
You can either give your customers the choice to prepay for your services or make it mandatory. It won’t surprise you that customers that already paid are much more likely to show up. We also offer a credit system that gives your customers the option to purchase a set amount of credits. Additionally, with this you can also give your (loyal) customers discounts.
4. Allow online cancellation and rescheduling
According to Getapp.com more than half of the customers prefer to cancel or reschedule their appointments online. This has a lot to do with the customer’s frustration with long waiting times on the phone and the lack of an overview of available slots.
After all, customers want to look at all available options and not just the ones given by the person on the other end of the phone.
Your customers will not only be more likely to cancel online instead of not showing up, but they are also more likely to reschedule.
5. Create a waiting list
Although not technically a way of reducing no-shows, having an active waiting list is a great way to fill up late cancellations. For example, you can make sure that the moment someone cancels, the first person on your waiting list automatically gets a notification that they are now enrolled.
This way you ensure that your calendar can always be filled up, even with last minute cancellations or reschedules.
Convinced your business can benefit from an increase in attendance? Start using the SuperSaaS online scheduling software today for free.
Create your first booking system here. If you need any assistance along the way, you are welcome to contact us.