How to avoid late cancellations

We live in a busy world. Ask someone how they are and the answer is generally, “Really busy!”

As a homeopath you must be aware of that. Maybe you’re noticing a few ways that it’s impacting your practice.

Is late cancellations one of them?

The conflict we all face

As the main bread-winner for my family, late cancellations used to have a big impact on me.

When I worked with a business coach, one of the things we did was take a look at my business structure and systems.

It soon became obvious that I was part of the problem in a number of ways.

1. Being too informal. When text message was my main method of communication I found lots of people contacted me with last-minute requests to change the time or even the date. I was receiving messages late at night and on the weekend too and I felt under pressure to respond.
2. Being too flexible. When I was willing to offer appointments on most days of the week I found myself rearranging my own plans to accommodate my clients’ needs.
3. Putting my own family on hold. I planned to just work one or two Saturdays per month but found that I had a lot of rearrangements due to my clients being invited to parties or going away for the weekend. I found myself moving appointments to days I’d planned to be free, so I rarely had a whole weekend with my family.
4. Being my own receptionist. I always rearranged appointments myself instead of referring people to the reception team at my clinic.

Steps I found helpful

I knew I needed to tighten things up a little.

Here’s what I decided to do:

1. Be more formal. I switched to email as my main method of communication as I found it helped me create stronger professional boundaries. I have a dedicated email address just for work, with an auto-respond set up permanently which changes frequently to reflect my schedule. (You can see what it looks like by emailing me on tracy@homeopathywithtracy.co.uk – just pop in to say hi!)
2. Have set clinic days. I find that two long days (including evenings) works well for me and my clients are happy with those hours too. If I can’t see someone this week, then I offer them a time the following week, or even the week after. Sometimes I set up ‘out of hours’ calls for genuine emergencies and that works fine. I now have blocks of time for working on cases, or writing a blog post or a newsletter.
3. Stop working weekends. One person said they minded but they still see me regularly on a weekday evening so that’s ok.
4. Use an on-line booking system. This costs me around £20 a month and has totally changed my life! You can read more about why I’m in love with my booking system here.

I also realised I needed to create greater clarity about my schedule, payments and cancellations:

1. By having my schedule and my cancellation policy on my auto-respond, from the very first contact, all my clients will see exactly what they can expect from me.
2. On initial contact with a new client I always attach my client-therapist agreement so they can see more about how I work. This sets the tone for our entire professional relationship. It outlines my policy on payments and cancellations.
3. I also have a printout for them to read and sign when they first come to see me.

I can’t say I never have late cancellations or no shows but they are rare.

Sometimes there is genuine human error and sometimes there is an unforeseen emergency and I completely get that.

I hope you found this useful, and that it helps reduce your late cancellations.