Sending the right message to customers when they need to see it can save companies money and greatly improve the customer experience
In a world of instant gratification and seemingly even faster communication, sending the right messages to customers is just as important as sending those messages at the right time. Clear and thoughtful customer communication can have positive ripple effects across many departments in a business and prevent time and resources from being wasted.
Customers do not always understand the intricacies of business operations at the same level employees do. Even simple appointment reminders or requirement notices can have a positive impact on successful meetings with customers and preparedness levels for those meetings, but only if they’re sent, received, and acted upon at the right time.
“In a world of instant gratification and seemingly even faster communication, sending the right messages to customers is just as important as sending those messages at the right time.”
“Bedside manner,” or a doctor’s attitude and approach to talking with a patient, has always been an area of emphasis in the healthcare industry. For hospitals, face to face communication isn’t the only time clear, timely connections are necessary between the organization and the patient. Many procedures, visits, and check-ups require specific methods of preparation by the patient before they come into the clinic or hospital. Things like fasting are simple actions that can ruin a visit if they are forgotten by patients.
If a patient forgets to fast for the required amount of time before a visit, the entire visit must be canceled and rescheduled, forcing the hospital to allocate more time to a patient when nurses and physicians could have been attending to others, while complicating the process unnecessarily for the original patient. Messages reminding patients to fast or listing all the appropriate paperwork they must bring to appointments the day before they’re scheduled is a simple improvement to clinic-patient communication but can save a lot of time and resources for both parties.
Other appointment-based companies can benefit from a similar emphasis on proper customer communication. Before any employees leave the warehouse to meet customers, a Zappix client in the moving and storage industry sends a message to their customers: “We would like to confirm your appointment today at 4:15 PM.” Their answer is automatically received, and the green light is given to employees to go to that appointment and work with the customer.
When customers can’t confirm their appointment, Zappix Mobile On-Demand technology automatically helps customers reschedule their appointment for a new date and time, while opening up their original appointment time for other potential customers to book. These timely, actionable communication channels save the moving company money on gas and employee time traveling to no-show appointments, while allowing them to efficiently manage their calendar of bookings automatically, without input from live employees.
Appointment reminders that can confirm or reschedule appointments, lists of required paperwork making sure patients bring the right materials to doctor visits, reminders to fast before procedures, and many other critical customer communications require not only the right message, but must be sent at the right time to have impactful results. We all move through live at the speed of Twitter. Sometimes the right reminder at the right time can be exactly what we need to have an enjoyable experience with a company, and those companies know exactly how costly missing that message can be.
