5 ways to make sure the customer shows up

You know the feeling when you can't hear or see the first customer of the day? You call after the customer, but your customer does not answer. You will soon notice your client has not arrived and you could have slept longer. Oh crap, the day could have started better.

How do you ensure that your customer will definitely arrive? Read our five tips.

Five ways to make sure the customer shows up

You can make sure your client arrives with the help of automation, a carrot and a stick. The most important thing is that your means do not scare the customer away, but are effective enough to avoid customer forgetfulness.

We put together five ways for you to ensure your customer arrives on time:

1. Charge customer in advance or add a reservation fee
   
   When your customer pays for the service when making the booking, the customer is more committed to arriving than without an advance payment. If, despite this, the customer does not arrive, your company will not lose any money.
   
   Alternatively, you can add a booking fee for your services (for example 5 dollars), which will be paid at the time of booking. A small reservation fee will not scare potential customers away, but it will weed out fraudulent customers.

2. Turn on automatic reminders
   
   Automatic reminders remind your customer of the upcoming booking via text message or email. When the reminder is sent to your customer automatically, it doesn't add any workload for you.
   
   Text messages is read in more than 90% of cases. So if for example ten of your customers forgot to show up, after starting using the text message reminders, the comparable number will be just one customer.

3. Prevent no-show customers from making an independent appointment
   
   Not all customers are valuable to your company. A customer who do not arrive at all, means your company will lost up to 500 dollars, depending on the length of the reservation. If, instead of a no-show, you receive a paying customer who buys services and products or your company for 200 dollars, you have earned a total of 700 dollars (500 dollars in bad debt savings + 200 dollars in sales).
   
   So, don't think that preventing an unwanted customer from making a booking will take away your turnover - this example shows you can even increase your annual earnings. In Vello, you can add a customer to the black list if necessary.

4. Overbook if necessary
   For group events, a 100 % occupancy rate is less likely, the more customer seats there are in the event. So, start collecting statistics about how many customers (on average) fail to arrive on time.
   
   For example, if your no-show rate is 6 %, it means that three people repeatedly drop out of a 50-person group event. By using airline tactics and overbooking group events on purpose, you can achieve full occupancy with almost no risk.

5. Define strict cancellation rules
   
   If you always are looking at last-minute cancellations, it's time to define some strict cancellation rules.
   
   Let your clients know, which is the deadline for cancellation made digitally and from what moment onwards cancellation is possible only by phone. In addition, define a possible cancellation fee (for example, 50 % of the price of the service) and the fee for cancellation after the deadline (for example, 100 % of the price of the service).