Tool
One slot that opens up, end to end
How many appointments a month, how many minutes confirming each one takes, what an hour of the person calling costs, what share ends up empty and what that empty hour is worth. Below, the same slot with an agent: where it goes, what it does at each step and what stays with a person.
One slot that opens up, end to end
- the agent does it
- a person does it
- always a person
the steps of the appointment
- Send the confirmation early enoughWhatsApp
Goes out with the lead time needed to refill the slot, not the one that came as the reminder's default.
- Read the reply and understand itWhatsApp
Understands I can't on Thursday but I can on Friday, which is much better data than a cancellation, because it does not free a slot: it moves one.
- Free the slot on the calendarCalendar
Frees it immediately, not when somebody gets to the system in the afternoon.
- Offer it to the waiting listWaiting list
Writes to the list in order, with a short response deadline, and moves to the next when nobody answers. This is the step that by hand never happens.
- Rebook whoever asked for another dayCalendar
Offers the calendar's real gaps and confirms the new appointment without anybody reading a grid.
- Record the appointment for billingBilling
Logs what was done and for whom, which is where money gets lost when the day was busy.
- Decide whether to charge the no showBilling
Charging or waiving a missed appointment is a commercial decision about a relationship. A person makes it.
Today that is 70 hours a month of admin and 12 appointments left empty. Between the time and the lost slots, USD 1,320 a month.
With the agent holding 6 of the 6 steps, 4 hours and USD 66 are left.
The difference is USD 1,254 a month, USD 15,048 a year.
And 36% of that difference is not time: it is the slots that get filled again because somebody offered them five minutes later.
Of what a person still does, the heaviest step is: Decide whether to charge the no show.
You set all five numbers. How the minutes split across steps is ours, taken from how it gets done by hand. The modelling assumption: the slot left empty falls in the same proportion as the confirming and the refilling stop depending on somebody having time.
This object is the interactive half of an article: The slot that opens at nine and stays empty because nobody had time to offer it