Help users to remember their appointment and bring the right documents

[sanjaypoyzer]

What

Many public services involve a face-to-face meeting or interview. These are often booked online. To reduce the problem of users forgetting the time or date of their interview, or showing up without the required documents that they need to bring, some services have started sending emails or texts to users to remind them when their appointment is and what to bring.

Why

This should be added because it's being used by multiple services across government at the moment and would almost certainly be useful to many more.

A well-known example is NHS GPs and hospitals) sending appointment reminders to patients. There's lots of evidence for this pattern (which is now common practice across GPs and hospitals) substantially reducing missed appointments.

• East Lancashire saves over 20,000 missed appointments with text reminders
• Behavioural Insights Team did randomised control trials and found a 25% reduction in missed hospital appoints. They tested multiple messages, with the best performing pointing out the specific cost of missed appointments to the NHS (£160).

HMCTS are also using text messages to remind users to remind people who have an upcoming tribunal about their upcoming appointment and what to bring. (I did their Alpha and Beta assessment.)

DWP Jobcentres also use text messages to remind users of their appointments with work coaches. I know from assessing the new Jobseeker's Allowance service (Alpha) recently that there are 10,000 appointments rebooked per month due to people not bringing the right documents, and the team are aiming to reduce this by creating ~186 different templates in Notify to tell people exactly what combination of documents each person needs to bring.

The Notify team probably have more examples of this sort of thing if needed.

[ignaciaorellana]

Thanks for adding this proposal @sanjaypoyzer I'm linking to dropbox paper on Reminder notification to add to your examples.

[ignaciaorellana]

This proposal is also linked to #91 on Sending text messages

[gazjoy]

@sanjaypoyzer Adding screenshots from DWP Jobseekers allowance.

How it works: users navigate through the journey and depending on the answers provided we build a dynamic list on our confirmation page. We are also sending a confirmation email via Notify using the Notify dynamic fields in the email template. There is one template for English and one for Welsh. We don't have 186 different templates! :)

Citizen confirmation page

Citizen confirmation email

Note: The list of evidence is different as the screen shots are from different user journeys.