No Call, No Show: Impact of No-Shows on Customer Attrition in Online-to-Offline Services

Problem definition: Worker absenteeism poses operational challenges across industries. Although extensively studied in traditional workplaces, its impact on online-to-offline service platforms remains overlooked. Unlike team-based settings, where colleagues can cover absences, customers on these platforms are particularly vulnerable to service provider no-shows because each customer is matched with one independent contractor. The service cannot proceed if the provider fails to appear. This paper addresses this gap by examining how service provider no-shows affect customer attrition and investigating the unique challenges and opportunities in designing effective mitigation strategies within the service platform context. Methodology/results: Using detailed transaction data from a European home-cleaning platform, we find that no-shows increase customer attrition probability by 25.6%, especially among loyal customers, and reduce customer lifetime value by 1.55% despite their low prevalence (3.51%). These notable adverse effects call for strategies to combat no-shows. We find that predicting gig workers’ no-shows ex ante is challenging, highlighting the need for post–no-show remedy strategies. Our findings suggest that frustration discounts after no-shows can help reduce attrition, whereas finding a substitute to restore service later the same day does not mitigate attrition. There is suggestive evidence that restoration is effective only if provided promptly (within one hour). We then build an analytical model that takes these empirical insights as inputs and delivers profit-maximizing optimal remedy strategies for service platforms tailored to customer and platform characteristics. Managerial implications: Our study sheds light on the significant adverse impact caused by no-shows in online-to-offline service settings, despite their rarity. We provide a framework that enables online-to-offline service platforms to design optimal remedy strategies to combat no-shows based on their own data, addressing the unique challenges of worker absenteeism in the gig economy settings.

History: This paper was selected as part of the 1RR initiative between the M&SOM Journal and the MSOM Society.

Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2025.0421.