What to do when a client turns up late

Every service business needs an answer to this before it happens, because in the moment you will make a worse decision than the one you would have made calmly on a Tuesday morning.

The question is not whether to be nice about it. The question is what you do with the fifteen minutes.

Work out your cut-off first

A cut-off is the point past which the appointment cannot run properly. It is not a punishment, it is arithmetic. If a service takes fifty minutes inside a sixty minute slot, ten minutes of lateness is absorbable and twenty minutes is not, because the client booked after them ends up paying for it.

Write the number down. Fifteen minutes is the most common cut-off for appointment based work. For anything with a fixed finish, such as a class, a bay slot or a courtesy car handover, it is much tighter.

The three options, in order

1. 1Run the appointment short. Best for lateness inside the cut-off. Do a smaller job properly rather than the full job badly, and say what you are dropping before you start rather than after.
2. 2Move them to a gap later the same day. Best when you have one. It costs you nothing, it rescues the client and it protects everybody booked behind them.
3. 3Treat it as a late cancellation. Best when they are past the cut-off and there is no gap. This is the option people avoid, and avoiding it is exactly what trains the behaviour.

What you should not do is run the full appointment late and absorb it yourself. That decision is invisible to the person who was late and extremely visible to the next four people.

Say it before it happens, not after

A lateness rule enforced for the first time in the moment reads as a mood. The same rule sitting on your booking page, in the confirmation and in the reminder reads as a policy, and nobody argues with a policy they agreed to at the point of booking.

Two lines is enough. Tell them that arriving more than fifteen minutes late may mean the service cannot be completed, and that the appointment may be treated as a late cancellation. Plain, specific and free of threat.

The repeat offender is a different problem

One late arrival is traffic. The fourth is a pattern, and the pattern is costing you real money, usually attached to somebody who is otherwise perfectly pleasant.

For repeat lateness the fix is structural rather than confrontational. Give them the first appointment of the day, where lateness only harms them. Or the last, where it harms nobody. Or ask for a deposit on future bookings. All three work better than a difficult conversation and none of them require you to have one.

The measurement nobody takes

Record the time you actually started, not the time that was booked. After a month you will know whether lateness is a handful of clients, one particular day of the week or your own optimistic slot lengths.

In a surprising number of businesses it turns out to be the slot lengths, and the client was never the problem.