Reduce No-Shows with a Waitlist (be able to offer slots for multiple people)

[wadim]

Is your proposal related to a problem?

When a meeting is cancelled, the calendar owner ends up with a gap in their calendar.

This leads to lost opportunities (money) and inconvenience (wasted time) for the calendar owner.

On the other hand, people who are interested in booking the nearest available slot are deprived of this opportunity.

Everyone loses.

The problem is perhaps less pronounced in the context of business meetings where meeting participants might have less flexibility and cancellations are not that costly.

But when running bookings for a healthcare practice or similar the problem becomes very prominent and it has a real and measurable business impact.

My anecdotal evidence shows that around 30% of first-time consultations in the area of mental health care are cancelled or end up as no-shows. This leads to significant business losses.

Also, in the context of health care, people would often jump at the opportunity to book an earlier slot as it becomes available.

Describe the solution you'd like

A solution would involve allowing people to sign up to a waitlist to be notified if an earlier slot becomes available.

Then when a time slot becomes available, Cal would reach out to people on the waitlist by text or email (or both) and give them an option to book the available time slot.

Cal might either reach out to everyone on the waitlist at the same time and the first person to book the slot gets it, or Cal might reach out to people one by one and give each person X minutes to book the slot (if waitlist position is important).

Describe alternatives you've considered

An alternative which is used today is for calendar owners to manage a waitlist manually.

This work is time-consuming and cumbersome to do so it is often skipped (by independent practitioners) or it is currently performed by receptionists (for clinics) but it comes at a cost of paying the receptionist for their work.

By adding this feature, Cal would directly contribute to the bottom line of calendar owners and demonstrate its dedication to making scheduling easier for its users.

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[headshigh]

i am looking into it

[PeerRich]

our product team will look into this. definitely a low-priority right now but we are slowly getting more inbound from industries that potentially need a waitlist

[leog]

Might be worth looking into creating a workflow for this, triggered by a cancellation and/or rescheduling, looking into the following bookings in the day to notify of an earlier empty slot

the solution will need to take careful consideration of a cascading effect, as anyone taking an earlier available slot will trigger the workflow for the following bookings in the day, possibly creating a lot of notification emails and availability churn

[notflip]

This is very interesting, any news on this?