We can only arrange an appointment with you once we have some details about your issue and what is needed to help you – this means that your first step is to phone us to explain your problem.
As an advice charity, we aim to provide a high-quality service to as many people as possible; however, our service is always in high demand as many people across Torbay need our help. An important part of our service is to advise clients by appointment.
Value your Appointment
We arrange appointments to address specific issues and schedule an advisor on a specific time and date to assist you. Frequently, our appointment schedule may be booked up for a few weeks in advance, so please have patience and understand that we might not be able to see you straight away. It is also imperative that you attend your appointment as allocated, or let us know in plenty of time if you cannot attend so that someone else can benefit from an available advisor.
Bring your documents
You need to ensure that you bring all the documents necessary with you to your appointment – you should check during your phone call what you need to bring, or check our general advice on what to bring. This is also important to identify what you need to bring with you to the appointment so that you can get the most benefit from your time with an advisor.
We need you to respect appointments made
When clients miss appointments without giving us notice, it can have a serious impact on the service because that appointment slot is unfilled. This reduces the number of clients that we can see and prevents us from helping more people. For that reason, we ask that all of our clients kindly follow the steps below if you cannot attend an appointment.
If you are going to be late for your appointment
When your appointment is arranged, you will be provided with a telephone number for our ‘client services line’ for the purpose of informing us if you wish to cancel or reschedule your appointment. We ask that you let us know with as much notice as possible if you may arrive late to your appointment. Please note that in most cases, we may need to reschedule your appointment for a different day if you are likely to be more than 15 minutes late for your appointment.
If you are more than 10 minutes late to your appointment, we will attempt to contact you by phone, and if we cannot reach you we will ask that you call us on the ‘client services line’ to reschedule your appointment for another day. Please note that we generally offer 1 to 2 hour appointment slots and can only keep to your allotted appointment times. If you arrive late this may impact our ability to deal with your issue entirely within the intended time.
If you cannot attend your appointment
We understand that sometimes other things come up, but we kindly ask that if you are not able to attend your appointment with us, you telephone our ‘client services line’ and leave us a message to let us know with as much notice as possible. This will allow us to offer your appointment to someone else who needs it.
It’s important that our clients understand that we may not always be able to offer another appointment right away. Therefore, if the matter is time sensitive, whilst we will make every effort to see you within the time frame, we cannot always ensure this will happen. It is important that our clients understand this in order to make informed decisions before cancelling an appointment.
If you repeatedly miss appointments, especially without giving us notice, or refuse our advice, we reserve the right to refuse you future appointments regarding the same issue.
If we need to reschedule your appointment
Whilst we make every effort to ensure that you are seen when your appointment is scheduled, there are occasions when we may need to reschedule your appointment because of illness, or other circumstances beyond our control.
If we need to reschedule your appointment we will make every effort to:
- Contact you as soon as we become aware of the problem. We will always try to telephone you to let you know that there is a problem. This is why it is so important to leave us a telephone number and allow us to leave a voicemail, or offer us an alternative way of getting a message to you.
- If we cannot reach you by telephone and we have your permission, we will leave a voicemail explaining that there is a problem, with a request that you contact us on our ‘Client services line’ to rearrange your appointment.
- If we haven’t heard from you by the end of the day, and we have permission to do so, we will notify you by email of the need to reschedule.
- If we need to reschedule, we will try to offer you another appointment as soon as possible, at the same location as, or one elsewhere if urgency dictates that this is necessary.
