I’m not alone.  Some studies show an average of 25% of appointments at medical clinics are no-shows.

It seems like for every missed appointment, there’s a different excuse. Here are some of mine:

• Keeping more than one calendar, and just being confused (Note: keeping only one calendar is a cardinal rule of Franklin Covey’s approach to time management)
• Forgetting to put appointments in any calendar
• Over-scheduling
• Booking appointments months in advance
• Last minute conflicts
• Not wanting to go in the first place.

Those are just some of my issues.  Other consumers probably have others. And regardless of our issue, the service provider loses out when we flake out.

Is there a solution?

I think so.  Like many people, most of my life is now managed online.  My BlackBerry is almost always by my side.  It’s my “other” brain.  It makes me wonder how many appointments I’d make – and not miss – if my service provider could email me appointment reminders.

It would be better than just sticking an appointment card in my back pocket.

Kelley Kassa
TimeTrade Blogging Team

Image Credit: InMagine FAN2017758

Case 1: wrong shipment, late, from a company from whom his wife has often bought. Worse: no calls returned.

Case 2: Capital One, the credit card company with a huge ad budget, not returning calls about adding more cards! In Johnson’s words, “I’d be more productive trying to hoist the goods from Fort Knox.” What’s in your to-do list, Capital One?

Commenters drive home the takeaways. Richard Turcott, Chief Marketing Officer of Ratepoint, says

Healthy businesses focus on delivering a great experience to their customers, an experience that their customers will be delighted with and want to talk about. Marketing, support and product quality all influence customer experience…

And commenter Tim Orr adds

This is exactly what Emerson meant when he said, “What you are shouts so loudly I cannot hear what you say.” …Marketing and branding are an inside job.

Hey, marketing execs: is bad service slashing the results of your outreach, while you get blamed?

(p.s. For a sweet postscript, three weeks later Johnson notes that the opposite happened when his wife’s bracelet broke. Nice.)

Kelley Kassa
TimeTrade Blogging Team

Image Credit: InMagine RDS032354

But people are still getting sick, and that means they need care. Is it hopeless? No.

Regardless of politics, many good people are doing many good things to improve care. And we’re proud of how, in hindsight, our podcasts spotlight true reformers who have real-world results.

• “Doctor of the Future” Jay Parkinson MD shared his vision in “Reforming a system that’s badly broken”
• With ten years of experience, Kaiser-Permanente’s Kate Christensen and Judy Derman describe their “Remarkable success in quality and satisfaction” with patient-centered Web technology
• Berkeley HeartLab’s Matt Sitter described how they’ve achieved “Strong and lasting relationships with our patients” using TimeTrade to coordinate appointments and resources.
  

In the final episode, after Matt speaks, I offer some closing perspectives on the future of healthcare, most of all this:

“There are tremendous opportunities to modernize healthcare simply by adopting best practices that are well established in other industries.”

We fervently hope that as we all work to improve healthcare, we include good business practices as well as medical magic. TimeTrade can help.

Click to learn more about TimeTrade’s medical appointment scheduling software.

“Many restaurants are using devices like alert pages, but those are limiting to patrons,” said Josh Bob, founder and president, Textaurant.  “You really can’t go far from the restaurant.  Essentially, your time spent waiting for your table is lost, since you can’t spend it as you wish.  What business wants to waste their customers’ time?”

Overly long waiting times are not just an issue for large chain restaurants.  Even the small, trendy local restaurant will experience waiting times of more than 30 minutes.  And as a report from Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research notes, customers “take a dim view of waiting” for a table.

The study recommends restaurants “that continue with seating from a first-come, first-served waitlist should consider ways to empower guests…”  One way to do that is a beeper service like Textaurant, or for other business, appointment scheduling from TimeTrade.

“Customers want more freedom and flexibility,” continues Bob.  “Combine that with the fact that 98% of phones sold today have texting capabilities, and it’s a natural match for restaurants that want to change how they handle customers waiting for tables.  Once we add voice mail and email capability to the system, we’ll have something that everyone with a mobile phone can use.”

Textaurant took an existing, aggravating and stressful business problem and applied an innovative solution to enhancing customer service.  And, it’s not just about improving customer service; it’s also about improving the bottom line.  According to Bob, restaurants using Textaurant’s service are seeing reductions in no-shows for reservations and decreases in customers opting to not wait for a table.

The Cornell study claims “anything that can be done to reduce perceived waiting time [regardless of industry] should result in an increase in customer satisfaction.”  Sounds like a great business reason to innovate customer waiting processes and procedures.   Just like Textaurant.

Kelley Kassa
TimeTrade Blogging Team

Image Credit: InMagine TT0701816

For the past two years businesses have dug in, deepened the trenches, reduced staff and cut costs to the bone. Now, in 2010, economic progress reports suggest the time is coming to start building and growing again.

But you don’t need to hire new employees or add a lot of costly equipment to turn these resolutions into realities. Every one of them has been attained by real companies using web-based appointment scheduling software. Read their stories in our case study library, and then make some resolutions for your own business in 2010.

Rich Silverman
TimeTrade Blogging Team

Public domain Image by Ivan Akira courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Paco Underhill, consultant and author of the book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, notes that 90 seconds is the limit to how long a customer accurately perceives the duration of his wait in a line. After 90 seconds, perception goes off track, and two minutes seems like three and three minutes seems like five.

At a certain point, Underhill says, waiting will be seen as a separate activity rather than part of a process, such as making an appointment.  Underhill notes simply: 90 seconds or fewer = success. More than 90 seconds = not success.

People online have an even shorter attention span – about 4 seconds.  Picture a potential customer waiting for a page to load on a website.  After four seconds, according to research conducted by web consultants Akamai and Jupiter Research, customers start to leave a slow website.  The only things consumers like less than waiting are high product prices and expensive shipping.

According to a post in callcentermanagement.com, call center operators shouldn’t concern themselves with how long people will wait before they hang up the phone when trying, for example, to make an appointment.  It is far more important, according to the site, to track and manage first call resolution – the percentage of callers taken care of with just one call.

What lesson can we draw from all this?  The key to customer satisfaction – whether on the phone, on line, or in line, is to take care of them fast and get it right the first time.

Rich Silverman
TimeTrade Blogging Team

Image Credit: InMagine TEMP2341

Customers want convenience: a quick process to book an appointment that matches their schedule.

Service providers want bookings, as many as possible. But the busier you get, the harder it is to take time to take calls.

Self-service appointment scheduling software easily enhances customer service. The result? Happier customers and more efficient and effective customer service.

Kelley Kassa
TimeTrade Blogging Team

Image Credit: InMagine PAA161000019

Here are some top benefits for personal service providers:

• Expanded hours for scheduling appointments. Most salons are open five days a week; three to four weekdays and one to two weekend days. Clients who call on a closed day to schedule an appointment will need to call back on a day when the business is open. Loyal customers will. New customers may just call another salon. With appointment scheduling software, clients can go online whenever convenient for them, and book their appointments.
• Fewer missed appointments. When clients miss appointments, businesses lose revenue. With scheduling software, the beauty salon can automatically set up appointment reminder emails.
• Greater efficiency = more clients serviced. Some personal services require a set block of time. For example, a massage is usually 60 or 90 minutes. Other services, such as hair coloring, can vary in time based on the client’s requirements, individual practitioner and number of concurrent appointments. With a scheduling software solution in place, the salon owner can get information on average times for appointments by various factors (day, stylist, etc.) and use that information to maximize the number of appointments per day.

Kelley Kassa
TimeTrade Blogging Team

Image Credit: InMagine FAN2034838

Manual scheduling always presents the potential for human error – maybe the date will be wrong or the time, or the provider or loan officer or location.  The possibility also remains that the moment an employee is finally trained to correctly schedule appointments, he or she will leave to pursue other opportunities.

Scheduling errors can have a resounding impact – delayed medical treatment, extra transportation costs, wasted time and money and a lingering sense that the business isn’t very well organized. The cost could run the gamut from lost revenue to a vocally unhappy customer to potential legal liability.

Using online appointment scheduling software can reduce the potential for those costs because it’s the customer who makes the appointment. While a Web calendar can’t listen with a sympathetic ear, it also won’t schedule a Tuesday afternoon appointment for Wednesday.

The core group of customers who prefer to call can still do so, and let office staff book the appointment in the system.  But the likelihood of human error is lower, because the software  is designed to make the process simple and easy.

Rich Silverman
TimeTrade Blogging Team

Photo by Joseph A. Carr under Attribution License Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

But for every magical or miraculous story, there is another—especially in the area of customer care—that shows healthcare is too often behind the times. Customers spend more time in healthcare waiting rooms than any other industry, and despite constant cost pressures, staff time is too often used inefficiently.

Technology can help. In this, the third podcast in our series Reinventing Healthcare with Technology, we hear from a TimeTrade customer about how they’ve improved operations terrifically, producing both better efficiency and better customer outcomes – while saving $125,000 a year, far more than the system costs them. How smart is that?

Matt Sitter is Director of Marketing for the Disease Management Program at Berkeley HeartLab (BHLInc.com). Listen as he shares his first-hand success at transforming the business of care: “It’s incredibly gratifying to see the success that a number of our patients have with the 4MyHeart program.”