How To Practice Owners Can Implement Missed Appointment Texts To Help Improve Their New Patient Generation

Introduction:

I want to write a real quick article to help out those Chiropractic and Physical Therapy owners who are struggling with patient retention. 

All right, so it's called a missed appointment text or email reminder. 

I know a lot of you guys have a system like this in place and that's awesome but I still recommend giving this a read just in case there is something you can tweak/implement.

And some of you guys don't have any missed appointment sequence or system. If that’s you, then you definitely want to read this article.

Not only am I going to show you guys the importance of having a missed appointment text, but also how to implement one as well. 

So we'll go ahead and jump right in. 🤿

A lot of people ask me when I'm explaining the need for this why they need a missed appointment text or email or phone call.  Because after all if they miss their appointment, obviously they're not dedicated enough to getting rid of their pain right? 

Wrong. ❌

Sometimes things just happen in life that take your attention and time away from other things. For example, you have to miss an appointment you had scheduled because you have to handle an unexpected thing. 

But you are still in pain…

Otherwise you wouldn't have scheduled an appointment to get rid of your pain. And so you, there's still that potential for them to become a paying patient. 

1️⃣ So the first thing is don't let your solid leads go cold.

I've talked to some practice owners that don't have any kind of missed appointment follow up and they just consider them as a lost lead or a lost patient instead of following up with them even more to get them back into the practice for another day.

However, these leads are not lost! They just need a little more motivation, a little more to get them across the finish line. 🏁

Again, like I said, these people are still in pain. They may just need one more reminder in case something came up the day of their original appointment. 

So the simple solution is to just follow up with them again. This follow up could be something as simple as saying, 

“Hey, we missed you today! Is there a day that works better? Let's get you scheduled for tomorrow if that works.” 

Again, like I mentioned, most practices consider no shows as lost and don't have much follow up. And some don't consider them as a loss, and maybe send out one text or one email and that's it, but that's not going to cut it anymore.  

You need a whole sequence of texts or emails. 💬 I know that when I say a “whole sequence” you guys probably get confused but it's really super simple and takes maybe five to ten minutes to set up.

Implementation

I wanted to kind of jump in it and set it up with you guys.

Feel free to use any software that lets you send out texts and emails to your patients list. 

For this example I am going to use something called Follow Up Helper (www.followuphelper.com) but following along will be pretty similar no matter the software you use. 

I am going to create a new campaign from scratch for this example and the first thing in doing so is to create what's called a trigger. A trigger is what tells the software to perform an action. For example, if you want to send a text to someone when a certain tag is added your trigger would be when the tag is added. 

For this specific situation you can trigger off when an appointment status is set to no show or cancellation or when a specific tag is added. However, this isn’t the part to give all your attention. 

If you are confused how to get a trigger set up in the software you are using let me know and I am happy to help you out. 

The important part is the action that comes after the trigger is fired. The first thing we want to do is add a text to be sent out. 

This text should say something like:

“Hey [First Name], we missed you today! When is the best time to reschedule?” 

And just like that, boom your first text is ready to go! 

The goal of this first text is to grab their attention and ask a simple question to answer. 

But like I said before, we need a whole sequence of texts, but we don’t want them to all be sent out at once so we are going to add in a wait action. 

This action will wait a certain amount of time and then move onto the next action in the list. For this sequence we are going to set it to wait a day. 

After the wait action we are going to send another text saying something like:

“Hey [First Name], it’s _____ from ____ again just checking back in with you. We have a spot open tomorrow at 3:30pm. Does that work for you?”

The goal for this second text is to again grab that person’s attention and direct them to rescheduling their appointment. 

After this text is sent we are going to add another wait action and then another text (see where I’m going?) 

The thought behind sending multiple texts is that they may see the first one and think about how they need to reschedule but then they get distracted again by life. This can happen multiple times so that’s why it's important to have multiple follow up texts. 

With this in mind, you guys may want to add anywhere from three to five texts in the sequence. 

These texts aren't meant to come off spammy. This is meant to be like a real human from the practice is texting the potential patient. 

I dive deeper into how to make your automation not sound like a robot in another article, so make sure to check that out for some kick butt tips and tricks. 

All in all, the goal of this missed appointment text is to keep your practice in the front of your patients minds consistently so that they are always thinking about you guys. 

I know this can seem long and difficult to set up but it’s actually super easy and will probably only take you five to ten minutes to get everything up and running. 

Remember these people are still in pain and still needing treatment, but just may need a simple nudge to get into the practice. 

This is something that can be automated so that your front desk doesn't have to do anything other than add them into the sequence and reply to texts. And if you're super techy, you can make it so that the software automatically puts them into the sequence. I know that's above a lot of people’s heads, but if you're super techy, you know what I'm talking about. 

If you need help implementing any of this or automating this sequence let me know. I am happy to help, just shoot me an email at thomas@followuphelper.com! 

If not, try it out in your practice and let me know how it goes. 

Create A Missed Appointment Text Checklist:

Here is a quick checklist to get you started with you missed appointment text.

• Launch the texting software you are going to use (we use www.followuphelper.com)

• Create a new campaign from scratch

• Set your trigger (the action that the software looks for to start the sequence)

• Create your first text

• Create a wait action for 1 day

• Create your second text

• Create a second wait action for 1 day

• Repeat until you have 3-5 texts

• Publish the campaign

• Start using your new missed appointment text campaign!