Massage Envy Appointment Reminder and Confirmation Software
For 2.5 years, after dropping out of college, I worked as a front desk associate at a Massage Envy franchise location. I took up this job for two reasons. I was eager to get experience in a sales role and I have always loved massages.
One daily task that sometimes felt a bit tedious was calling each of the customers set to come in the following day and reminding them of their upcoming appointment. I began to wonder why we took the time to call when we could just as easily send out texts. Sure, some customers probably enjoyed the personal touch of receiving a personal call like that, but the majority seemed ambivalent or even bothered by the call — if it even reached them. The majority of calls went unanswered to voicemail, and I don’t think many people listened to the voicemail in time for it to matter if at all. All this considered, I don’t see any valid argument to call clients rather than text. Even if you have to shell out $35/month for an automated texting system, there are the benefits of the reminder getting through to more customers via text, so that they can cancel their appointment if they need to and thus free up a spot on the schedule for someone else which would make that person happy to find a spot as well as the cancelling customer who then doesn’t get surprised with a hefty same day cancellation penalty. It seems that the benefits would outweigh the light cost for the subscription which is as cheap as half of a single massage.
I began to look into subscription appointment reminder softwares, and there were plenty of reputable options at around $35/month. However, there was just one major roadblock from being able to do this. In order to connect the reminder software with our appointment schedule, we would need to automatically export data for the following day’s appointments from our appointment booking software every day. No problem, this should be easy. I’ll call technical support for our appointment booking software and ask them whether we can have that appointment data emailed to us each day or if there was a setting to have that data exported or anything along those lines. Low and behold, for some ungodly reason, Meevo 2, our appointment booking software, doesn’t have such a feature. Apparently there was nothing this Meevo employee or any other could do for me in this regard. I was pretty incredulous, so it took me a few different calls with different Meevo techs to finally accept this conclusion. There is a feature in the reports section of Meevo that lets you export the needed data for tomorrows appointments in CSV format which is exactly what is needed to automate reminders, and yet, the Meevo techs are telling me that there is no way this data can be automatically exported or sent to email each day.
Around this time, I had reduced my full time schedule at Massage Envy to only one day a week since I had taken another full time job working on an IT team where I was doing some software development and automating workflows of other departments in our company. Often for these tasks, the scripts I made would perform webscraping to log into a website using user credentials, click to a certain page, and then click a download link to get a file of data which would then be inserted into our database or used in some other way. On Sundays working at Massage Envy and still doing the tedious task of making confirmation calls, I realized I could use the web automation skills I had picked up to automate the downloading of the appointment data from Meevo each day, thus bypassing the need for some Meevo feature to effectively do that same thing. I had also had recent experience with using programming to send out scheduled texts for a side project of an sms based journaling service. Now with the ability to both get the appointment data and send texts, I decided to code what I had once set out in vain to look for online, so that I could make my job and the other FDA’s easier. Over the course of a few months of Sunday’s, I worked on building the software in the spare time between front desk associate responsibilities. Eventually it worked and I put it into production at our store, sending text reminders out each day automatically and eliminating the need to call. The software was not yet setup to change the confirmation status in Meevo based on customers responses to the appointment reminder, so we front desk associates still had to look at the text responses and either cancel appointments or check appointments to green to indicate that the customer had confirmed. Nonetheless, my automation had saved us around 30 minutes of tedious effort each day while doing a better job of getting the reminders to more customers. The other front desk associates were appreciative of this, and I felt like a hero.
Soon thereafter I left my job as a Massage Envy Front Desk Associate to free up more time to work on other things. Having worked there for 2.5 years, leaving was bittersweet knowing I probably wouldn’t see my work friends ever again. Massage Envy culture had taught me that you could have authentic relationships at work and have fun while getting it done. We had had good times and lots of laughs while riding the ups and downs of the day to day.
With the new extra time I had, I began to transform my little Meevo integrated appointment reminder automation script for that store into a full platform which could scale to as many stores as would want to use it. I put my adjusted code on a server and built a web interface that would allow FDAs at various stores to login to an account for their store. Once logged in they would, for example, be able to turn on and off the appointment reminder automation as well as send manual texts and look at past logs of recently sent out texts. I also made the program change the confirmation status in Meevo in real time as customers send their response to confirm or reschedule. So now I had built a fully featured software product that served a need for Massage Envy which no other software has yet addressed — or so I thought.
As I began calling front desk associates at various Massage Envy locations across the country from Alaska to Georgia to ask them about their current confirmation process and find out whether they might want an automated reminder system like I had built,
