Celebrating SMS: Client experience & the convenience of automation.

SMS has proven to be an extremely effective way to communicate with people. The open rate of SMS in Australia is 94% with 86% of recipients opening an SMS within 30 minutes of receiving it. Compare that to email, where the open rate in healthcare is just 25.7% with a click through rate of only 3%. SMS is a no-brainer, must-have in your practice management toolkit.

Cancellations and No Shows

In an ideal world all your clients would attend their scheduled appointments on time, every time. The modern lifestyle is busy. Many people don’t prioritise their health and so it becomes easy to forget or put something else ahead of oneself. The lax commitment to that once all-important appointment begins and people don't often follow through. Cancellations and no shows are a reality of running a practice.

Every lost appointment impacts your bottom line and the financial impact of a no-show or late cancellation doesn’t stop at that one appointment. It’s the cost of operation in admin time spent by your or your team rescheduling or chasing the client up, as well as the lost opportunity of a treating an existing or welcoming a new client.

There is no getting away from cancellations and no shows, but you can mitigate the rate of these occurring. Use SMS to ensure your clients commit to their appointment or provide you with ample notice so you can make the time available for another client.

A simple, customised and automated SMS appointment reminder from coreplus can help you do this:

• Set a reminder to go out to a client 24 to 96 hours prior to an appointment
• Customise the reminder to include personalisation such as the client's name, appointment time and location, the practitioner the appointment is with, down to even the room the appointment is in
• Time zone considerations are included, with the time of the appointment in the reminder set based on the client’s time zone
• View responses to reminders via notification, on appointment, the dashboard and reporting
• Get a traffic light visual on your clients appointment via the SMS icon based on how they responded to their reminder‍

‍Facilitate Telehealth via SMS‍

With the release of Telehealth by coreplus, our own secure, private and automated-workflow approved telehealth solution, you can now also set a Telehealth link to be included as part of an SMS appointment reminder. Your client will receive the link to their session via SMS, allowing them to conveniently access the link when it is time to join the session. You can access the auto-generated link straight from the appointment in your calendar with one click. This also means you (or your team) no longer have to generate a new meeting or copy the link to an email and ensure you send it to the correct client. You can say goodbye to that inefficient process for good!

‍New: SMS your waitlist‍

Our latest feature that contains SMS functionality is the waitlist in your calendar. You can now SMS the clients on your waitlist to ensure any appointment spots that have become available are filled. Gain admin efficiency with a workflow that allows you a one-to-many notification, saving your practice time from calling each client one at a time.

Wish your client a Happy Birthday

It’s nice being remembered on your birthday. Client experiences are about how you make your clients feel and the experience they have with your practice is just as important as the service you provide them directly. Setting up an automated birthday SMS takes less than a minute and goes out to every single one of your clients. This is a wonderful and easy way to delight your clients. You might even like to provide a special birthday offer for their next appointment!

Send a friendly reminder about outstanding invoices

Chasing debt is a frustrating process that costs you both time and money, and is usually done on a case-by-case basis. Our tool to SMS client’s with an outstanding invoice is flexible where, you can target debtors based on the period of debt (ie, 0-30 days, 30-60 days etc) and, SMS the type of debtor too - ie client or third party. The tool also allows you to un-select a specific recipient from a list that you do not wish to receive the friendly nudge. Set your template for this type of SMS once, and use it as you see fit.

Two-way SMS, on the spot

For those times where you can’t reach a client via a phone call or email, you can send what we call a manual SMS (not part of any of the above automated and templated workflows) that allows you to text a client from coreplus like you would from a mobile device. The client can respond to your SMS, allowing you to have a regular two-way conversation via SMS through coreplus.

Notify your practitioners of a new booking

Another great way to use SMS in coreplus is to enable an automated SMS notification every time a new appointment is made for you. This is particularly useful if you have contractors working for you on a part time basis who may not check their calendar regularly and it ensures they never miss an appointment.

Secure your account

Multi-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security to your coreplus account, on top of your username and password. Enable multi-factor authentication in your coreplus account to receive a code via SMS, that you are prompted to add after your username and password.

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