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.