Customer not home? How to cut no-shows and wasted callouts on plumbing jobs

A booked job where nobody opens the door costs you a drive and a slot you could have sold. I could not find a no-show rate for plumbers that I could check against its data. The nearest measured figure I found comes from garages: Klipboard's booking data from 2,794 UK and Irish garages logged 12% of 1.8 million bookings as no-shows between January and May 2026.

Most of what I could find on cutting that number comes from hospital clinics, where it has been tested in randomised trials. A reminder text helps, and its wording changes how much it helps. The wait matters too: a long gap between booking and visit is one of the factors most often linked to people not turning up.

How often do customers miss a booked plumbing appointment?

I found no plumbing figure, Dutch or British, that I could check against its data, so the honest answer comes from two neighbouring trades.

Garages: 12%. Klipboard, which sells garage management software, analysed more than 1.8 million bookings made through its Autowork Online system at 2,794 garages in the UK and Ireland from January to May 2026. Twelve in a hundred ended in a no-show. Klipboard published the figure alongside a new deposit feature it sells, so read it as a vendor's number about its own customers.

Housing repairs: up to 30%. In its spring 2023 tenant newsletter, the UK housing provider Derby Homes reported "no-access" for up to 30% of repair jobs with agreed appointments, as many as 900 of the 3,000 repair appointments it visits each month. Its definition is the one you would use: "no one is at the property at the agreed time". That is one housing provider in one season, and the newsletter itself headlines the level as record-high.

If you have never counted your own, the garage figure is the closer yardstick. Those are bookings for jobs a business invoices the customer for, measured in 2026.

What does a no-show cost you?

Each empty doorstep is a van out and back with nothing to invoice, on top of any job you turned down to keep that slot free. Run Klipboard's 12% across a week of 20 booked visits and you get 2.4 empty doorsteps a week on average.

Derby Homes described the knock-on cost for its own repairs service: a no-access visit "not only wastes money, but it also causes delays in us carrying out repairs for others." In a one-van business, the others are the customers you told you were fully booked.

Do reminder texts reduce no-shows?

In healthcare trials, yes. The 2013 Cochrane review pooled seven randomised trials with 5,841 participants and found that text reminders improved attendance at healthcare appointments compared with no reminder. Across its trials, 67.8% of people in the no-reminder groups attended, against 78.6% of those sent a text and 80.3% of those phoned. The authors call the evidence low to moderate quality. Their background section names patients' forgetfulness as one of the main reasons for missed appointments, which is the gap a reminder is built to fill.

Garages tell a less tidy story. In Klipboard's data, garages that actively used SMS reminders had similar no-show rates to those that did not, and some of the heaviest senders, at over 1,000 messages a year, still recorded no-show rates above 15%. That compares garages with each other rather than running a trial, and it comes from a company with deposits to sell. Derby Homes also had reminders running: the same newsletter that reported its 30% tells tenants to change a booking by replying to their SMS appointment reminder.

My reading: a reminder rescues the customer who forgot. It does little for the one who has already booked someone else.

What should a reminder text say?

Something specific. In two randomised trials at a London hospital trust, published in 2015, outpatients were sent one of several reminder texts five days before their appointment. In the first trial, with 10,111 participants, the text that stated the cost of a missed appointment to the health service brought the did-not-attend rate down to 8.4%, against 11.1% for the hospital's existing message. The trust counted a patient as did-not-attend when they neither turned up nor cancelled in advance, which is a no-show in plain words.

The second trial repeated the result at 8.2%. Making the same point about cost in general terms, without the specific figure, did worse, at 9.9%. A version that put the phone number for cancelling into the text made no significant difference to the no-show rate.

In the first London trial, a reminder that stated what a missed appointment costs the health service cut the no-show rate from 11.1% to 8.4%.

Those were hospital patients, and the cost the text named was the health service's. Nobody has tested the effect on a plumber's text, as far as I can find. My guess is the principle travels: name the job, the time and what is being held for them, in place of a generic "reminder of your appointment".

On timing, the trial's authors note that their texts went out five days ahead, earlier than in previous studies, which generally sent them one to three days before. Ideally, they wrote, they would have sent theirs one to three days ahead too, but they could not change the existing schedule.

Why does booking on the first call matter?

Because a caller still waiting for your callback has booked nothing, and can book someone else first. Klipboard's VP Payments, Lochan Sim, names the customer who will "find a better price down the road and don't let you know" among the reasons garages see no-shows, and a "we'll ring you back to fix a time" gives that customer extra time to look around before the job is even booked. The callback runs on its own clock, covered in how fast to call a plumbing lead back.

Once the job is booked, the wait still counts. A 2018 systematic review of 105 papers on no-shows in healthcare scheduling found the most commonly reported significant factors were high lead time and a history of earlier no-shows. Lead time, as a 2015 eye-clinic study defines it, is the time between the day an appointment is made and the day it is for. In healthcare, at least, that argues for offering the soonest open time you have.

This is the part SwiftGuard does. The agent offers the caller two or three open times from your calendar, reads back the one they pick, and books it while they are still on the line. When the caller gives a new address, it reads that back and waits for a clear yes before it books, because a misheard street is still a real street, and a van sent there knocks on a stranger's door. The walkthrough of a booked call shows the whole flow.

How do you make cancelling easier than not turning up?

Give the customer a way out that takes less effort than staying silent. A cancellation the day before leaves you time to fill the slot. The London trial's authors declined to read a rise in cancellations as a bad result, since a cancellation is "one route to avoiding a missed appointment and attending at a future date". Derby Homes lets tenants change or cancel a non-urgent repair up to 24 hours ahead by replying to the reminder text.

A customer who rings to call the job off can do it with the SwiftGuard agent. They prove the number is theirs by reading back a code texted to the phone they are calling from. If the job falls inside the notice you have set for calling a job off, the agent tells them you may still charge for it and asks whether to go ahead, and when a job is called off that late your owners and admins get an email, so someone may still be able to stop the van. The freed slot can be booked again straight away.

The honest limit: SwiftGuard does not send the reminder text before the visit. That one is yours, from your own phone or calendar app.

Why the visit goes empty	What helps	What the evidence says
They forgot	A reminder text before the visit	Healthcare trials: 78.6% attended with a text, 67.8% with no reminder
The reminder said nothing specific	Make it specific to the job (my guess)	Untested for trades; in a London NHS trial, a text stating what a missed appointment costs the NHS: 8.4% did not attend, against 11.1% with the old text
The visit was a long way off	Offer the soonest open time	Long lead time is among the factors healthcare studies most often find
The address was wrong	Read it back and wait for a yes	None I found; it is simply a visit to the wrong door

Count yours first

Go through last month's diary and mark every visit where nobody was in. Divide by the visits you booked. If the result sits near Klipboard's 12% or above, start with the reminder text, because you can send that one tomorrow. If your jobs leak away in the days before they are even booked, see how the plans work; billed monthly, they start at €69 a month ex VAT.