Coping with no-show behaviour in appointment services: a multistage perspective
Journal of Service Theory and Practice
ISSN: 2055-6225
Article publication date: 12 April 2022
Issue publication date: 19 April 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to help businesses cope with consumers' no-show behaviour from a multistage perspective. It specifically identifies no-show reasons at each stage of appointment services and proposes the corresponding coping strategies.
Design/methodology/approach
By focusing on an outpatient appointment service, we interviewed 921 no-show patients to extract no-show reasons, invited 18 hospital managers to propose coping strategies for these reasons using a Delphi method and evaluated the proposed strategies based on EDAS (Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution).
Findings
The results reveal ten reasons for no-show behaviour (i.e. system service quality, overuse, did not know the appointment, self-judgment, forget, waiting time, lateness, uncontrollable problems, time conflict and service coordination), which have nine coping strategy themes (i.e. prepayment, system intelligence, target, subjective norm, system integration, ease of navigation, reminder, confirmation and cancellation). We classify the ten reasons and nine themes into scheduling, waiting and execution stages of an appointment service.
Originality/value
This study provides a package of coping strategies for no-show behaviour to deal with no-show reasons at each appointment service stage. It also extends the research in pre-service management through appointment services.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China [No.2017YFB1401200]. The authors also thank Latif Al-Hakim for his helpful suggestions on the initial version of this study.
Citation
Xu, X., Hu, M. and Li, X. (2022), "Coping with no-show behaviour in appointment services: a multistage perspective", Journal of Service Theory and Practice, Vol. 32 No. 3, pp. 452-474. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSTP-08-2020-0196
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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