Advantages of Text Message Appointment Reminders For Dentist’s Offices

Any dental office knows that it is essential to remind patients about appointments a day or so beforehand. This practice has become very common with all sorts of medical offices because it helps decrease the rate of no-shows. Even so, this important task may have consumed a lot of your office staff’s time in the past.

Besides, despite your best efforts to make phone calls to your patient’s homes, the wrong person may answer the phone, messages might not get passed on to the actual patient, and some busy people might take the message for their own appointment and still forget the time and date. It requires quite an investment to make reminder calls, but it is still not a totally effective solution.

Send Text Messages Instead of Phone Calls

Instead of making dozens of phone calls each day, why not send text messages to your patients who have cell phones? In fact, you will probably find that the majority of your adult patients, or the parents of kids, already have phones that are capable of sending and receiving texts. Besides, recent studies have demonstrated that text messages have a 99% open rate!

Besides the fact that you can find automated solutions to send out these text messages without having to ask on of your office staff to personally key in the message, there are many other advantages.

  • You don’t have to worry if your patient cannot answer the phone right away.
  • The information can be saved right on your patient’s phone.
  • You can reduce communication errors and misunderstandings.

Some of the new text messaging systems can even interface directly into your existing appointment system. This means that text messages can be generated without manual intervention at all. This is bound to save time. It should also further reduce appointment no-shows and misunderstandings. Since your office staff does not have to be involved in manually making all of these calls, your dental office should also become more efficient and save money.

There are many advantages to replacing old-fashioned reminder calls with reminder text messages. This solution should help your office run better, and you will probably find that your patients appreciate the convenience.