Nudging customers to book services and attend their appointments

Noona Beauty had a problem that was two fold, the first problem was that potential customers were calling the salon but not making an appointment. The second part of the problem was that new and returning customers were not showing up for their appointments.

We looked at all 7 steps of the journey and identified the friction points that existed during the selection phase and the purchase phase were the biggest barriers to the desired behavior.

In the selection phase, customers were overwhelmed by the number of choices they had to make and during the purchase phase, customers were not committed to attending their appointments and were unaware of the consequences.

We considered a variety of touch points but ultimately decided that our intervention would be best received via WhatsApp as it is cost effective and easy to implement. We optimised existing WhatsApp messages and created new messages using behavioural economic principles.

For the offer message we reduced choice overload by using the decoy effect which reduced the number of choices. For the message post booking, we sent well timed reminders that used commitment devices.

After a month of testing messages with customers we found that the offer messages had a 17% response rate and an 18% sale conversion on the responses. Going forward we will be optimising the offers and iterating. We found that the commitment device significantly decreased the cancellation rate by 13%.