How to Reduce No-Shows with Teachworks
Does your teaching business deal with no-shows on a regular basis? You may want to consider looking for tutor management software that comes with features that can help to cut down on student absences.
Teachworks offers a number of features that can help you to reduce absences and clear up scheduling confusion with ease. The following features will be explored in more detail below:
- Automatic Lesson Reminder Emails
- Manual Lesson Reminder Emails
- SMS Lesson Reminder Emails
- User Accounts
- Schedule Confirmation Emails
Send automatic reminder emails to cut down on no-shows
Sending an automatic lesson reminder to students and their parents before their lesson can be an effective way to reduce no-shows. If the lesson time is no longer convenient, clients can easily follow up with you to reschedule.
Lead Time
On your account settings page, you can customize the “Lesson Reminder Lead Time in Hours” setting. This setting will determine how long in advance clients and employees will receive a lesson reminder email.
Templates
Each type of recipient (students, families and employees) will receive a different type of email, making it possible to tailor the message to each recipient group. You can fully customize the templates for each group by going to Account & Settings > Notification Templates > Lesson Reminder Templates.
Each template has a unique set of merge tags that can be added to the template to further personalize it. When emails are sent, the merge tags are replaced by real data from your Teachworks account.
Enabling Lesson Reminder Emails
Lesson reminder emails are enabled for each user separately. To enable lesson reminder emails, edit their profile, scroll to the “Lesson Notifications” section and select the “Enable Lesson Reminders” option.
If you would like to update this setting for clients and employees in bulk, you can use our import feature. Follow the steps below:
- Download the student, family or employee list
- Download the relevant import template
- Complete the first name, last name and or email address field in the template for each user (you can copy this from the student, family or employee list to speed up the process)
- Set the “Event Reminders” column to “On”
- Import the template and choose the “Update Matching on First & Last Name” or “Update Matching on Email Address” option
Note: To make sure that the template is completed correctly, you may want to first do a test with 1 or 2 client or employee records.
Need more information? Visit our knowledge base!
Send manual lesson reminder emails
In addition to automatic reminder emails, we also have a manual lesson reminder feature (manual reminders use the same template as automatic lesson reminders). If you have clients that forget about their lessons on a regular basis, you may want to use this feature to send additional reminder emails to give them ample time to follow up with you (prior to their lesson) if there’s a scheduling clash.
To enable the option, go to your account settings page and scroll to the “Calendar & Event Settings” section. Here you can enable the “Manual Lesson Reminders” setting. Once you’ve enabled the option, you can click on an upcoming lesson in the calendar. You will now see a “Remind” link — simply click on the link to choose the relevant recipients and fire off a reminder email.
Send automatic SMS lesson reminders
Text messages generally boast higher open rates than email, making it great for limiting no-shows. To enable this add-on, go to Account & Settings > Integrations & Add-Ons > SMS Lesson Reminders > Enable and click on the “Manage” link to customize your preferences.
Lead Time
You can set “Lead Time Hours” for teachers, students and families separately. This setting controls the number of hours prior to a lesson an SMS is sent.
Templates
Templates are fully customizable and you can further personalize each message using one of the merge tags on the right of the page.
Enabling reminder SMS messages
As with lesson reminder emails, lesson reminder SMS messages need to be enabled for each user separately on their profile.
A note about additional costs: To send SMS messages to clients and employees, you will need to purchase SMS credits. SMS prices depend on the country of the recipient and you can view the price by country by going to the Integrations & Add-ons page, finding the SMS Lesson Reminders section, and clicking on the “Buy Credits” link. On the Buy Credits page select the country in the “View SMS Rates by Country” menu to view the prices.
Find more information below:
Enable user accounts for easy access to schedules
Another effective way to reduce no-shows is to provide your clients with unrestricted access to their schedules. Teachworks allows you to easily enable user access for your clients, allowing them to login, manage their schedules, and follow up with you well in advance if they won’t be able to attend an upcoming lesson.
To enable user access for your clients, follow these easy steps: Enabling & Disabling User Account Access
Need more information of exactly what clients can see while logged in? Here’s a comprehensive guide: The Ins and Outs of Customer User Accounts in Teachworks
Send schedule confirmation emails to reduce confusion
This feature allows you to send your clients a personalized email with a snapshot of all of their scheduled lessons for a selected period of time. Clients can refer back to the email to easily confirm their lesson details and iron out any scheduling conflicts well in advance.
Once you’ve enabled the Schedule Confirmation Add-On, you’ll be able to access it from the Email tab. On the “Send Confirmation” page, you can select the relevant recipients, choose a “Schedule Confirmation Period” and customize the message.
For more information about using this handy feature, visit our knowledge base: Schedule Confirmation Add-On
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