The Business Case for SMS Appointment Reminders

I was chatting to my dentist the other day. Luckily it was in the comfy sofas of the local restaurant whilst waiting for a Chinese take-away to be rustled up, so wasn't one of those usually mumbled interactions you have whilst lying in the chair wondering what previously undiscovered nerve endings he might prod with his sharp instruments...

Once he'd established what I did for a living we got onto talking about how SMS Appointment Reminders would benefit the running of his surgery. He'd had a visit from the sales rep of a large UK telecoms operator (the one who thinks it might be a good idea for us all to talk) and they'd mentioned SMS appointment services. He'd dismissed it as a luxury item he didn't need after hearing that the annual cost was in excess of three grand. That's a lot of cash for a small business to fork out and after all, his current system of sending post card reminders seemed to work OK thank you very much, and it didn't cost him very much. At least that's what he imagined.

First thing on Monday morning I decided to take a closer look at a cost comparison of the two options - traditional post card via Royal Mail and high-tech SMS.

So, taking the size of his surgery as being fairly average with around 5,000 patients who regularly come in for oral overhaul, I made some assumptions:

70% of his patients have a regular check-up at least once a year, whilst the remaining 30% have six monthly checkups (so two a year). I then guessed that 30% of those attending a checkup need at least one more follow up appointment so that remedial work can be carried out (the unfortunate minority!). This gives us a total of 8,450 appointments per annum. The exact numbers aren't important as long as we compare like for like when looking at both the paper and SMS cases. The comparison will work equally for a smaller surgery with as few as 1,000 appointments a year.

A quick look on the websites of the Royal Mail website and a company offering personalised post card printing suggested that postcards cost 62p each to buy (if bought in bulk) and 2nd class stamps are 30p - so materials will cost 92p per postcard. If we estimate that it then takes 2 minutes per appointment to check the diary and write-out each postcard, and that it then takes 30 minutes, once a week, to stick stamps on all the cards, take them to post office and post them we can then derive the labour costs for sending post cards. If the receptionist does this task and she (or he) gets, say, £8.50 an hour, that means a total labour cost of £10,389 per annum to process 8,450 postcards (give or take 20% for margin of error, so £8,000 at best, £12,000 at worse).

Now if you compare this to the average cost of sending bulk SMS via a typical web based service, you're looking at total annual costs of about £3,100, including the one-off application setup fee, monthly application licence rental, the SMS charges and, importantly for the comparison, the receptionist's time to generate the batch upload file from the surgery's appointments system.

So we're looking at £10,398 per year for a post card appointment reminder system versus £3,110 for an SMS based alternative. That's a saving of about 70%, which represents a very valuable cost reduction for a small business in this climate...

So I've established that the business case works. What other advantages does the mobile channel bring. What about these if you're still not convinced:

• Message delivery can be tracked so you can see whether the message was delivered.


• Potential for 2 way interaction (confirmation that the appointment is still OK for the patient). May come in handy as proof that a reminder was accepted if you plan to charge penalties for "no shows".


• Potential to communicate further with the patient ("Your xray results are ready. Please call us to discuss" etc).


• Marketing opportunities ("Have you considered teeth whitening. We have a special discount offer").


• More personal communication - text is now ubiquitous and you'll even receive the reminder if you're on Spain on holiday

Some would say that some of these activities (such as the X-Ray example) are better and cheaper to do by phone, but how many times do you call someone only to get their answerphone and it could be intrusive to call them on their mobile, especially if they are at work. SMS is much less intrusive and yet much more likely to be received promptly than a voice mail left on an answering machine in someone's home.

Of course this type of service isn't limited to dental practices. It works in any situation where you need to remind customers of appointments of any kind, or any date linked event for that matter. What about using it for reminding people about job interviews, restaurant bookings, tax return due dates, doctors surgeries, NHS appointments, court appearances etc etc.

For larger companies, it may be worth investing in integration with exisiting computerised diary systems so that SMS reminders are automatically generated, further decreasing the cost of the SMS option. In this case cost may be a little higher, but if your legacy systems use standard interfaces (APIs) then you'll probably find the cost pleasantly reasonable.