Reducing no-shows for in-person passport appointments

What is the agency priority?

A priority for the Department of State (DOS)’s Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA) is to learn whether sending automatic text message reminders to customers reduces no-shows to in-person appointments. In 2023, the no-show rate was approximately 18.6%. Encouraging customers to proactively cancel their appointments when they are no longer needed can help to make more appointments available to other customers and can help improve efficiency of passport agency operations.

What did we evaluate?

Starting on May 22, 2024, CA implemented automated text messages to remind customers of their upcoming appointments and provide a new option to cancel their appointments by text. The texts are sent approximately 48 hours in advance of customers’ appointments, contain the appointment details, and ask recipients to reply to confirm, change, or cancel their appointment.

How did the evaluation work?

The program change was evaluated by comparing the no-show rates for customers who created appointments immediately before and after the text message roll-out. Customers are in the group eligible to receive automated texts if they created their appointment during the two-week period after May 22, 2024 at 1:30am EDT (n = 52,440). Customers are in the control group if they created their appointment in the two weeks prior to this date/time (n = 50,417).

What did we learn?

We found that automated text message reminders did not change the no-show rate for in-person appointments by a significant amount. The no-show rate was reduced by 1.6 percentage points for customers in the treatment group compared with the control group, but this difference was not statistically significant.

Exploratory analysis suggests that text message reminders led to a statistically significant increase in the cancellation rate of 2.1 percentage points for customers in the treatment group. About half of eligible customers opted in to receive texts, suggesting that robotexts may serve an important customer experience function for customers who would prefer to use text messages to help manage their appointments.

This evaluation has implications for efforts to use low-cost, automated tools to improve the efficiency of providing a critical service to Americans. Automated text message reminders did not meaningfully reduce appointment no-shows, which implies that automated texts may not be the most effective way to improve the efficiency of in-person passport services. However, we also rule out meaningful increases in no-shows, suggesting that introducing text messages is unlikely to have unintended negative effects.

Verify the upload date of our analysis plan on Github.