No one likes facing cancellations, especially meetings. Imagine taking hours to perfectly schedule and prepare crucial meetings for your business, just for those meetings to be cancelled last minute, leaving you to start from scratch and losing all of that time just in a matter of seconds.
To make matters worse, you will need to spend additional time trying to reschedule those meetings, and due to this could you lose not just time but money, as well as your leads, could lose interest.
71% of Professionals waste 3 hours every week rescheduling no-show meetings
Why is this a Problem?
Meetings with no-shows can be a major distraction in the workplace. Not only do they increase frustration when you show up prepared and the other person doesn't arrive, but they also cause many small attention switches related to rescheduling the meeting. It's more productive to keep most meetings than to reschedule them.
It’s true that unattended one-on-one meetings can appear to open up more space on your calendar, but research, shows that not effectively managing your appointments lead to 4 hours per week of wasted time on your day to day schedule
Why rescheduling isn't effective all the time
They can always easily reschedule another meeting, but that's not going to change the cancellation that occurred.
Tell your clients when appointments need to be cancelled or rescheduled. Direct communication signals that you have the utmost respect for their time, and letting them know is one of the best ways to keep a client’s trust intact. It also sets the expectation that if they need to reschedule, they owe you the same professional courtesy of letting you know.
What is the solution?
You know you don't want to be a part of the negative statistics, let's turn it around and make it a positive, here's how you can minimise cancellations, unnecessary rescheduling and wasted time:
- Follow up with your clients
It makes sense to want to know why the meeting has been cancelled and how you can find a way to get them back to the fold. Writing up a follow email shows you care and want to find a solution to resolving the cancellation and getting another booking directly after!
- Improve Customer Engagement
One of the best ways to minimise cancellations is to make sure they don't get cancelled at all. Even though you can’t totally prevent prospects from cancelling meetings, you can reduce the chances of cancelled meetings in the way that you position your meetings and appointments...
- Make your meetings the priority
More often than not, cancellations are the result of a prospect prioritizing another task over your appointment. Sometimes this is intentional, other times it’s accidental.
This could be anything from the prospect of just forgetting your meeting to actively choosing another meeting over yours...
- Use an Appointment Scheduler
This may not prevent cancellations, however, it will prevent you from having to take more of your time to reschedule and confirm a new meeting after a cancellation. Simply sharing them your booking link can make rescheduling an afterthought as if it never happened, allowing you to continue your productive day!
Every professional shouldn't continue facing this issue, let's make this a problem of the past and make the best of modern solutions.
CatchApp lets you create a bookable calendar for your meetings and appointments, and lets you fill your schedule efficiently. If you're having eight meetings a week for a whole year (except when you're out of the office, of course), CatchApp saves you up to one month of time that would usually be spent organising meetings, rearranging, and following up on RSVPs.
Want to make scheduling hassle-free? Set up your account here.
