Has this ever happened to you?
You get a reminder text about an appointment and what is supposed to be a convenient experience powered by the miracle of modern technology turns into a total nightmare.
Perhaps it went something like this:
Peach Tree Dental: You have an appointment on 10/22/2019 at 2:00 pm. Send Y to confirm, N to cancel, or to change, call 555-432-3409. Type OUT to opt out of text.
You appreciate the reminder, but you also have a problem. It turns out that you’re not sure if you’ll be able to make the appointment and would like to see if they have something a little bit later in the afternoon. You click the phone number to call but it’s after hours, and your only option is to leave a message.
You leave a message, but explain that you’ll be at a conference most of the next day and you’re worried about them being able to reach you. Not only does the conference meeting room have terrible cell phone reception, but you’re going to be occupied all day.
Then you get the idea to reply to the text and notify the office of the conflict. Perhaps you can just converse via text and not have to deal with the hassle of phone tag.
You type a reply that looks something like this:
I can’t reach your office, but I need to reschedule. Hopefully for the same day. I can come at any time between 2:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. Can you let me if that would work? If not, then can you fit me in sometime next week?
Immediately, you get this reply:
Sorry, you sent an invalid response.
So, not only are you unable to get help with rescheduling, but the appointment reminder system didn’t even log your response!
As you can imagine, this experience is frustrating, and you’d probably prefer that your patients and clients can avoid an experience like this. Because the above dialogue example is the standard among many reminder systems on the market, you have a chance to set yourself apart from other offices and provide a five-star customer experience by using Weave’s Smart Confirmation feature.
How Weave Smart Confirmation Works
Weave’s reminder system allows users to send personalized texts with multiple response options because the system has smart recognition built in. Instead of requiring someone to respond “Yes” or “No” or type C to confirm, Weave’s system recognizes any affirmative response. This allows the message to say, “Hi _______, this is Julie from Meadow Springs Dental. I noticed you have an appointment coming up on Thursday, April 30th. Is that still going to work for you?”
Weave’s system is smart enough to recognize affirmative responses. It uses smart machine learning to identify any affirmative or negative response, including emojis like the thumbs up and okay symbol.
Further, if the patient needs to reschedule, your staff will be notified in Weave with an Alert. Your team will be able to read and review each response and take appropriate action.
Weave’s Smart Confirmation will immediately recognize requests to reschedule, and instead of getting an error message, your patients and clients will get a response from your team as soon as they receive the alert and reply to it. Patients can express their wishes more specifically and have an experience that is more life-like, not robotic.
Other Features Included with Weave Enhanced Appointment Reminders
Adding a personal touch enhances your relationship with patients and clients, making them feel appreciated and valued by your office. While we all value convenience, technology is notorious for removing the personal touch in our correspondence that makes us human.
Weave’s Smart Confirmation features are intelligently designed with advanced technology and algorithms that allow your team to communicate seamlessly with patients by combining the best automation with human involvement.
Here’s a glimpse of what you can do with Weave Smart Confirmation
Personalize Reminders Based on the Purpose of the Visit
- Type of appointment
- Provider
- Operatory
Create Master Default Settings
Once you sync your data with Weave, you can set up all of your auto reminders. You’ll be able to tell Weave what all of your appointment status options are and what each of them means.
For example, you can set up recall types which would allow you to send a reminder to a patient who is overdue for a visit.
You might decide that you don’t want every type of status to receive an automated recall reminder, and Weave is flexible enough to allow you to make those adjustments.
After you have specified the types of appointments you want Weave to use for recall reminders, you can then map your statuses in the app.
The statuses that appear are in your Weave system are based on your office’s software, and you’ll be able to match them to Weave’s pre-determined statuses, which include:
- Confirmed
- Unconfirmed
- Attempted Contact
- Canceled
- Completed
- In Office
Create Personalized Automated Reminders
There are three types of auto-reminders you can send to patients and clients:
- Birthday wishes
- Appointment reminders
- Recall reminders
Each of these reminder types can be customized and personalized to fit your needs and reflect the personality of your office. For this example, we’ll do a deeper dive into how the appointment reminders work.
To get you started, Weave already has several pre-populated messages that you can use or customize. Or, create your own from scratch. For added convenience, there are five pre-set reminders for the following situations:
- Email 1 week before
- Text 1 week before
- Text 2 hours before
- Text to unconfirmed appointments 3 days before
- Email to unconfirmed appointments 3 days before
You can add as many reminders as you’d like and then customize the settings for when to send them, who should receive them, and what form of communication you’d like to use. For example, you might decide that you want to email a reminder 48 hours before an appointment to patients who have confirmed. For patients who haven’t confirmed, you might prefer to send them a text 72 hours before their scheduled appointment.
When you choose to edit or create a reminder, you’ll be able to customize it in several ways, such as:
- Name the reminder (this is an internal way to keep track of your reminders).
- Whether to send the message before or after the appointment.
- Your preferred timeframe to send the message. There are presets of 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks before or after. Or create a custom number of hours or days based on what’s right for your business.
- Time of day to start sending the messages.
- Type of reminder (text or email)
- Who to send the reminder to (All patients, confirmed patients, or unconfirmed patients).
- Type of appointment (You might want different reminders for different types of appointments and procedures).
Being able to customize which messages go to people and how they’re delivered based on their appointment confirmation status is a powerful differentiator that is likely to help patient show-up rates while also enhancing the user experience and making your team’s job more pleasant and productive.
How to Customize Your Messages
Each reminder message has an individual text template that you populate with your unique message. There are samples already available, but please feel free to make these messages your own.
To personalize your message, you can add variables to the messages that pull from the patient record to populate the message. For example, if you type, “Hello {first name}, then Weave will populate the “first name” with the name of the patient you have on file.
Some of the customizable variables include:
- First name
- Last name
- Preferred name
- Appointment date
- Appointment time
- Day of the week
- Month
To make sure that you don’t have any embarrassing errors go out where the patient’s name field doesn’t get populated, you’ll be able to see a message preview that will show you what the message will look like to the patient. This ensures that your system is linking properly, and you’ve added the variables correctly.
Family Text Reminders
Weave has also created a Family Text Reminder Template. This allows you to consolidate appointment reminders, which is especially helpful for pediatric appointments where the parent’s phone number is listed in the child patient’s mobile phone field. This way, instead of a family of four getting four individual messages, one person in the family will get a message reminding them of the appointments.
Linking with Your Patient Management Software
You can set up Weave to share the updates from automated confirmations with several Patient Management Software solutions. When a patient sends an affirmative reply to an automated reminder, their status will automatically change to “confirmed” in your software.
Conclusion
An appointment reminder system should adapt to the needs of your patients. However, it will only work as intended if you take an active role in setting it up to provide an optimal user experience. We encourage you to take advantage of all the features that Weave has to offer. Interested in learning more? Click here to schedule a demo.
