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Appointment Reminder Services
January/February, 2003
Some appointment
setting software packages feature built-in confirmation and reminder
options, while others don't. If
your software does not provide this function or if you want to provide it
independently from an appointment-setting package, you can use a separate
reminder service. Forget-Me-Not, from Professional Teledata, is one such
service. This is how it works:
"This
is Dr. Smith's office calling to confirm the appointment for Greg, on Monday,
May 27th, at 2:00 PM. To
confirm this appointment press 1, to hear this message again press 2, to leave a
message, press 3."
Dentists, doctors, stylists, and therapists know
missed appointments are missed revenue. Keeping
track of appointments is only half of the scheduling problem – finding out
whether the customer will show up is another!
Traditional methods of confirming scheduled appointments are only
marginally effective. Mailed
reminders are often discarded with junk mail or are forgotten by the appointment
date. Making confirmation calls
during regular business hours usually means reaching voice mail or answering
machines.
Forget-Me-Not is a service that calls your clients'
patients or customers to remind them of their upcoming appointments.
This is done with an interactive voice response (IVR) system, which
delivers pre-recorded announcements and has the additional capability to track
responses, record messages, and track outbound call attempts.
Forget-Me-Not provides a program that extracts the daily confirmation
list from your clients' scheduling software and sends it to the Forget-Me-Not
system by a secure Internet link. This
system then calls your clients' patients in the evenings to confirm their
appointments, posts the results to your clients' account on the Forget-Me-Not
Web site, and sends them an email listing their confirmations.
If a patient leaves a message, clients can click on the highlighted
message button to play it.
All account configuration is done through your
clients' Web account. All
Forget-Me-Not recordings, including the company's library of more than 3,000
first names, are recorded by a professional female voice-over artist. Forget-Me-Not is a hosted service and is available for a low
monthly fee. There is no equipment to buy, install, or maintain.
For more information about Forget-Me-Not, call
Karen Black at 800-344-9944 or visit
www.professionalteledata.com.
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