You know, I do get a personal call from my dentist, carpet cleaner, and my kids' doctor before an appointment. I call my customers before meeting with them too.

But what a waste of time for all of us right? Why not send out this automated voice mail message instead:

"Don't be late! I don't have time to call you, but you better have time to meet and PAY me."

Nice.

I think you'll be able to sell it, but it seems like a DIS-service to me.

Also, NOTHING pisses my wife off more than a voice mail from an automated system.

Just yesterday she got one from a local service we donate clothes to (pretty sure it was them again), and she let out a throaty roar in the kitchen because she hates them so much, she wants a different service now.

That said: we get automated calls from a couple of different things in our life, and while I can't say that I love the calls, they are effective --- they actually change behavior.

That being said, when we bought a stove at Home Depot, we received a personal call from the truck driver delivering the product to see if we were ready and where would be the most convenient place for him to carry it into the house.

So, automation probably does work sometimes, but if it's not all the time, then it's just an administration problem (as noted in the thread above)

If you get 10 customers a day, you treat each one like they're a duke; if 100 a day, each one is made to feel like a person. 1000 customers per day are a vague blur, an avalanche of humanity of whom only occasional glimpses are clear, 10,000 customers a day is statistics, and 10 Million per day is an abstraction.

Different businesses deal with different customers and different customer volumes change the shape and functionality of the organizations that serve them.

The question for you is, at what scale does a business built on somewhat random customer service experiences work?

The American Massage Therapy association has 57,000 members. Massage therapists are a small portion of the overall personal/professional services industry. 57k / small number = big number. Does it matter if it is 400k or 4 million or 40 million? Not to me. (If I was going for VC, yeah, there are 40 million -- you can see it right here on this chart in the up and to the right portion.)

We recently set up a free diet program that also involved behavioral change. The conversion rate on the site in terms of signups were great (about 70% actually). We were also tracking a couple of products that were integral with the diet that we referred our customers to and the sales weren't quite close to matching the numbers we were seeing.

Long story short, we tried asking for phone numbers, and those who provided were given calls a couple of days after signing up, and the response rate has shot up exponentially, including sales of the products. The people didn't mind the calls either, even after we asked if we could call them once a week to follow up on progress.

Of course, these were personal calls, not automated ones.

Email reminders are also automated, yet you are more likely to miss it because we're not glued to our monitors 24/7. A phonecall however is more likely to get your attention. There's been many times I've missed or forgotten something that could have been prevented with a short call or text message.

That said, perhaps a good balance would be for the business to integrate their policies with a system like this: allow customers to exempt themselves from the reminder system either in part or in whole, and then make sure those customers get charged extra if they miss an appointment.

When you book an appointment with a service provider, service provider cannot book anyone else, EVEN if some other customer is interested to obtain their services at the same time.

But I hate interruptions. Make the interruption as quick as possible. To me the advantage of getting a recording is the minimal interaction. I don't have to exchange greetings with a robot. So make it fast.

I may not be representative.

I would just want one additional feature: allowing people to opt-out. A lot of appointments are recurring, take hair-cut for an example. This will work effectively for the first time, however some customers (who actually remember appointment) may started fearing that they would get a useless call even though they perfectly remember where and when they need to go.

So, a simple Press 7 if you don't wish to have automated reminders next time will be a great addition.

You do? Must be a American thing. I never ever heard of that.

An idea to counter this would be soothing and pleasant voice templates that may disarm those easily set off by automated voice systems.

Everything is white-labeled, but if you like I can ask my dentist who they're using.

As someone else mentioned, his monthly enterprise account seems priced too high. You can buy full practice management software for this much.

I'm guessing you'll have to rely a lot on your AdWords kung-fu that you talk about so much, because I think customer acquisition is going to be your toughest challenge.

Edit: Actually, I partially take that back. The ads look competitive, but the results look penetrable. Your blog post announcing the site is already #21 for that term, so you appear to be in good shape.

Edit 2: Although you may do well for SEO, I can't help but wonder if you're taking a hit on word of mouth sales with such a generic name that doesn't use a .com. "Have you tried Appointment Reminder Dot Org? My sales increased 10%!" It make work, but I think you're putting all your eggs in the SEO /SEM basket.

I'm really interested in hearing what the content marketing angle is for appointments though. Bingo cards had a natural content fit.

If I figure one out, I'll tell you. This is one of the things I'm less than sanguine about.

I wish you the best of luck.

Also, for what it is worth, in this user's opinion:

1) I'd prefer you disable or hide (probably disable) the green scroll arrows when you are already at the edge of the ribbon. (Ie., when you are on "Apppoinment Reminders" the arrow on the left is gray and disabled while the one on the right is green; when you are on "Who is it for?" the arrow on the left is green while the one the right is gray.) The infinite loop aspect confuses and annoys my reptile brain. I expect to see new content when I click "next". (The fact that your image is a placeholder may be making this worse for me. If I saw the same image crop up again it may be more obvious that this is cycling.)

2) I'd make more of each column on the pricing page clickable. Maybe it just that I'm using a short screen, but scrolling down to the "Sign Up" link seems a pain, especially when it looks as is if "Small Business" is already selected due to the highlight.

3) Personally, I really dislike the green of the Small Business column heading on the pricing page.

Since you're keen on testing, have you user tested the pricing page yet, or is this just a first cut?

I'd love to hear more about your struggles with this, Patrick. I suspect this is an undertreated topic.

bingocardcreator. appointmentreminder. These names leave little doubt about what it's about. I've also noticed a lot of TV shows do this very well too: Undercover Boss, Pawn Stars, Desperate Housewives.

So what should the rest of us do? Go with a "trusty generic" so we don't have to lose attention trying to explain what it is? Or come up with something short and slick, with far fewer SEO synonyms?

Otherfolks have pointed out that there are competing services. I think the secret here might be to be friendly, non-technical, and drop dead simple.

"we"? Aren't you alone in this venture?... Or it's just a "professionalness" thing? I'm kind of torn between "I" and "we" for projects completely made by just one guy...

Note that I already had three freelancers working on this, so it is literally accurate, if you're feeling dissatisfied by that explanation.

Patrick, ever A/B tested the I/we thing?