Why one-letter replies beat a booking app

Every few months a crew asks us whether they should have an app. Something their customers install, with the appointment in it and a button to confirm.

The honest answer is no, and the reason is not technical. Somebody calls a plumber once every three years. Nobody installs software for that.

What people will actually do

They will read a text message. They will not open a link, log in, or find an email. If the text asks for one letter, they will send one letter.

Across the crews on Arrive, the evening-before message gets a reply from 94% of customers within an hour. The same information sent as an email with a confirm button gets about a fifth of that.

C confirms, R asks to reschedule. That is the whole interface, and it works on a flip phone.

Write it like a person

The default messages we ship are deliberately plain, and the crews who do best rewrite them anyway. Three things worth keeping:

• Name the business first. An unknown number asking to confirm something reads as a scam.
• Say who is coming and what they drive. "Marco is 20 minutes out. White van, blue ladder." is the most-replied-to message in our data.
• One question per message. Two questions get one answer, and you will not know which.

Where the reply should land

A reply is only useful if somebody sees it. Put the thread on the job, not in a personal phone, so whoever is in the office on Thursday can read what was promised on Tuesday.

That is also what makes the reply safe to act on: an R does not silently cancel anything. It opens a reschedule that a human still says yes to.