Healthcare
Appointment request
Take the request, not the booking: who, which service, and two days that would work — then call to confirm.
Why this survey gets sent
“The phone rings while I have three people standing at the desk. I take half the details, I write the rest on a sticky note, and by the afternoon I am calling people back to ask what I already asked them this morning.”
A request survey is not a booking system and must not pretend to be one. Its whole job is to arrive complete — a name, a number, a service and two days that would work — so that the call back is thirty seconds of confirmation instead of five minutes of questions.
What is in it
- Name and the number to call (required)
- Which service is needed — a closed list
- First visit, or a returning patient? (single response)
- A preferred date, and an alternative one
- Morning, afternoon, evening or any time
- Anything to arrange — an interpreter, step-free access (optional)
- Anything the clinic should know before the visit (long answer)
About 4 min to answer
Appointment request
About 4 min
How to write this survey
Say it is a request, not a booking
The worst thing that can happen to an appointment request is that the person who sent it believes it was confirmed. They send it, they arrive on the day they chose, the doctor is with somebody else, and you have a lost slot and an angry person in the waiting area. Write the sentence plainly in the intro and again on the thank-you screen: this is a request, we will call you to confirm it, and nothing is held for you until we do.
Say how long the call will take to arrive: we call every request back within one working day. A specific promise prevents the second and third call from the same person, which occupies the reception phone more than new requests do. If a request lands outside working hours, say that too, so an overnight silence is not read as neglect.
Ask for two days, not one
Ask for a preferred date and an alternative, and for a part of the day rather than an exact hour. A request carrying a single option is usually refused or renegotiated on the phone; a request carrying a second one closes on the first call. That one change removes about half your confirmation calls, and it costs the person sending it a few seconds.
Avoid a box where people type their own time. “After work”, “early morning” and “any time after four” are three answers that cannot be sorted or ordered, while four options — morning, afternoon, evening, any time — are read at a glance and let you order the call-back list by them.
Make the service a closed list
Make the service a list to choose from rather than a box to type into. The list tells the person what the clinic actually offers, which heads off a request for something you do not do, and it tells you which practitioner or room the request belongs to before anybody opens it. Keep one open option at the end — another service — and read what arrives in it once a month: it is the cheapest market research you will ever own.
Add one more question: is this your first visit? The answer changes how long the slot needs to be and what the front desk has to prepare before the person arrives. It is the cheapest question on the page in effort and the most valuable in what it does to the schedule.
Keep clinical detail out of the request
Do not ask the request to explain the condition. A box labelled “describe your symptoms” looks helpful, but it turns a simple administrative request into health data you must protect and restrict, and it invites people to write detail the front desk neither wants to read nor can act on.
If you need more, ask only for what is operational: do you need an interpreter, step-free access, a companion with you, a female practitioner? Then one small optional box for anything the clinic should know before the visit. The clinical detail belongs in the consultation itself.
The reply is part of the survey
A request does not end at the send button. Write the thank-you message yourself instead of leaving the default: repeat the date and the part of the day they chose, say when the call will come, and give the clinic's number in case they need to hurry it. The screen they see after sending is the last thing they remember of the whole exchange.
Then watch two numbers only: how many requests arrived, and how many became actual appointments. When the gap between them widens, the problem is not the request — it is the call. Either it comes too late, or the times people ask for are not the times you have, and both are fixed by editing the options on the page rather than by sending a reminder.