What Can Be Salvaged From No-shows?

Author and motivational speaker, Bryan Tracy often says “keep your sales pipeline full by prospecting continuously. Always have more people to see than you have time to see them”. Any person in sales knows that building a pipeline that keeps your practice full of leads is crucial and vital to keep your practice growing through conversion and closing sales. The only way to succeed in this is through prospecting, however, prospecting is easier said than done. What Tracy says also applies to eye care scheduling appointments. In a previous post, we emphasized the importance of double booking in order to prevent a spot from being empty due to an appointment no-show. Prospecting is an important part of the sales process and can be compared to an opportunity. There is a good opportunity and a bad one. Leads too can be of good quality and bad quality, and while you fight to keep good quality leads, you want to get rid of bad quality leads the quicker possible.

Rescheduling is an opportunity to build a pipeline of leads. In the case of no-shows, rescheduling should be immediate. The first step towards achieving this goal is to call patients and politely ask for the reason for the no-show and schedule a new appointment. In doing so we might be rescheduling patients who might not show up in the future too. The question remains, how many no-shows can be salvaged? In other words, when should a no-show patient be rescheduled?

In our practice, a no-show patient is never allocated an appointment spot on his own. It has to be double-booked with a new prospect. Moreover, since rescheduling no-shows may bring up a bad quality lead, we filter frequent no-shows, cancel them, and politely refrain from rescheduling them. “The customer is King”, is an old known adage that indicates that a customer can dictate, command, and have the right to get whatever he needs. A king or an emperor like Julius Caesar to whom Veni, vidi, vici Latin phrase is popularly attributed, did show up to the Roman Senate around 47 BC after he had achieved a quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela. However, a person who repeatedly does not show up for an appointment should not have the privileges of the king.