Customer reception: does confirming an appointment prepare someone to attend?
An accepted appointment may still go unattended, even when the person genuinely intends to come. For a reception manager, the question is specific: does inviting visitors to plan their attendance improve attendance beyond a simple confirmation?
What the literature establishes
Peter M. Gollwitzer (1999, American Psychologist) distinguishes an intention to achieve a goal from an implementation intention, which links a recognisable situation to a specific action. This review explains why wanting to act and having planned when, where and how to act are not equivalent. For reception services, it suggests that agreeing to an appointment and preparing to attend serve different functions.
A field test of following through
Katherine L. Milkman, John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian (2011, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) tested prompts to plan an influenza vaccination in a randomised workplace experiment. Asking people to write down a date and time increased vaccination relative to the control group. The outcome was an action actually completed, rather than merely a stated intention.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that every confirmation should include a planning form. Yet these studies do not establish that such a procedure would improve attendance at all customer appointments, particularly when the appointment time is already fixed. The hypothesis worth testing instead concerns planning steps that remain undecided, such as when to leave or how to reach the right building. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
A workplace vaccination programme does not reproduce the constraints of either a specialist consultation or a business visit. A plan does not remove transport barriers, caring responsibilities or an inaccessible entrance. Non-attendance should therefore not be interpreted as proof that the visitor failed to prepare.
A practical check in Lausanne
Within SHR’s “Accueil client” programme, an exercise applicable in Lausanne is to test this hypothesis for comparable visits in medtech, higher education institutions, international sports organisations or Lake Geneva region scale-ups. Randomly allocate appointments to either the usual confirmation or the same confirmation with an optional invitation to privately plan a departure time and the entrance to use, without submitting that information. Over a period defined before the test, compare the proportion of non-cancelled appointments attended, recording cancellations separately in each group. An improvement would be a local finding requiring confirmation, not proof that every missed appointment is the visitor’s responsibility. To go further: explore the Client Reception training in Lausanne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Client Reception in Lausanne
- client reception
- Lausanne
- research
- training lausanne