Here are all posts by the author Frank Cort: Page 1 of 7

Entries by Frank Cort

Control Your Online Schedule with “Availability Overrides”

Are you tired of having to create fake appointments on your calendar to block off time on your Apptoto online booking pages? Have you wanted to add or adjust your schedule availability online easily? You’re in luck if you answered yes to either of these questions! We’re excited to announce a brand new feature on our online scheduling pages: Availability Overrides. This feature is immediately available to all Apptoto users. Use it to easily block off available time on your booking pages for specific dates or date ranges.  You can also use Availability Overrides to expand available times on specific dates! For example, if you are leaving on vacation and want to make sure no one books time with you, simply create an Override for that week. This will block out the time on your schedule on your website and prevent any new appointments from being created. As another example, if you are planning on coming in earlier on a specific Friday, you can easily adjust your schedule availability for online bookings on that specific day by creating an override with an earlier start time. Setting Up Availability Overrides in […]

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Improve Customer Satisfaction by Sending Appointment Reminders

Appointment reminders are valuable in ensuring your business provides great customer satisfaction. Often, the stress of making and keeping appointments can interfere with employees’ ability to offer good customer service. Appointment reminders ensure that your business and customers are in sync and provide regular reminders before the set date or time so that this stressor does not interfere with customer service. Integrating appointment reminder software into your business model will help ensure consumers remember upcoming events. As a result, your customers become more satisfied with your approach, which keeps them informed, leading to better service delivery. Also, establishing a clear and direct line of communication with your client through text and/or email reminders will help win business and keep your clients coming back! What Are Appointment Reminders? Appointment reminders are messages or notifications sent by a business to its customers, reminding them of an upcoming event like a doctor’s appointment, restaurant reservation, or shipment delivery. These notifications are essential to maintaining an organization’s steady flow of clientele, as service provision can be planned out days in advance. In addition, appointment reminders provide a safety net for any customers who want […]

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Appointment Scheduling With Apptoto and Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a powerful collaboration and appointment-scheduling platform that is quickly becoming a go-to solution for businesses of all sizes. One of the standout features of Microsoft Teams is its Virtual Meeting feature. Apptoto now integrates with Microsoft Teams Meetings, making it super easy to schedule a Virtual Meeting automatically when clients book time with you through an Apptoto Booking Page. If you are familiar with Zoom, then you know the benefits of virtual meetings. For many, the nice thing about Microsoft Teams Meetings is that it’s included in your existing Microsoft subscription. Many businesses already have access to Microsoft Teams and can avoid subscribing to Zoom in order to host virtual meetings. With Teams Virtual Meetings, you can easily host virtual meetings with clients. You can easily send your clients a join link that lets them join the meeting and communicate with you over voice and video. Teams also has a powerful screen share feature that lets you or your client share their screen. Appointment Scheduling Features Microsoft Teams Meetings lets you instantly create a meeting and send an invite link. It also allows you to schedule and […]

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Best Practices: Automated Appointment Reminders for Healthcare

Missed that appointment reminder from your doctor? That’ll be $50, please. No-shows and late arrivals are common problems for many healthcare providers. They create gaps in scheduling, reduce revenue, and make it difficult to run an efficient practice. Many doctors are turning to no-show fees to try to reduce the number of patients showing up late or not showing up at all. On one hand, it makes sense: missed appointments alone cost the U.S. economy an estimated $150 billion each year. But punishing your patients isn’t the right answer either. Instead, communicate more with patients before their appointment through automated appointment reminders and confirmations to make sure they show up without any heavy lifting required by you or your staff. Using these tips and tricks, you can easily set up customized healthcare appointment reminders for your practice. Concerned about HIPAA? Learn more about our HIPAA-compliant appointment reminders and security features. Automate Appointment Communication We conducted a survey back in 2015, looking at 178,000 random messages: Automated messaging and reminder systems for appointments reduced no-shows by nearly 50% across all providers. That no-show reduction translates to huge pay gains, simply by […]

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Less No-Shows, More Learning: A Case Study with Spanish55

Appointments can be a major struggle for any busy professional. Doctors, dentists, and accountants all demand time that breaks up the normal work day and wreaks havoc on the daily routine. But what about when the appointment is for personal enrichment? It’s even easier to forget or push the time aside in favor of work, family, or other life obligations. Spanish55 has to deal with this reality on a daily basis. Their on-demand Skype Spanish lessons are primarily taken by busy business professionals who are often juggling full schedules and may have trouble finding the time to fit in their regular Skype sessions to learn a new language. We had a chance to meet with Spanish55 co-founder Abraham Arechiga, who shared lessons their business has learned. He told us about how Apptoto reduced their no-shows for online/Skype lessons by one-third by automating appointment reminders. Can you briefly describe your business? We are a team of highly qualified instructors — all native Spanish speakers — who are passionate about teaching conversational Spanish. Our specialty is working with English-speaking professionals to provide efficient, convenient, and customized Spanish language learning over Skype. What […]

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Apptoto’s seamless integration with Virtual Meetings

Based on our data, we’ve seen a 10x increase in the number of virtual meetings this year!  This change in behavior is almost certainly due to COVID; however, Virtual Meetings are expected to stick around long after the world recovers from COVID. We’ve recently launched two new features that will make sending appointment reminders and scheduling Virtual Meetings easier through Apptoto.  Those features include: Apptoto / Zoom Integration Virtual Meeting Fields (for automated messages sent for all your appointments) Apptoto / Zoom Integration You can now connect Zoom to your Apptoto account. Once connected, your Apptoto Booking Pages can automatically create Zoom meetings and send the correct Zoom meeting information to your clients. To find out more about this feature, please visit our Zoom Integration Knowledge Base page. Virtual Meeting Fields Apptoto now has the ability to detect if an appointment is meant to be virtual and then automatically send the right information in your appointment reminders.  You can use the “event.is_virtual_meeting” field in your Auto Messages rules now to do so.  For example, if you wanted to set up an Auto Message Rule that would only target virtual meetings, […]

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Helping Appointment Based Businesses Recover After COVID

Appointment-based businesses were some of the hardest hit during the worldwide COVID-19 economic shutdown.  Now, as the world begins to re-open, it’s important that you (as the owner of manager of an appointment-based business) recover from COVID-19 as quickly as possible and in a safe manner. To ensure a quick and safe recovery for your business, it’s important to keep your clients informed about your plans for re-opening and give them an easy way to reschedule their missed appointments, so we’ve added some key features/tools that make it easy to do just that.  These new features will also be useful after we’ve all recovered, so we wanted to highlight them piece by piece.  Please read on to find out more. Thanks! – Frank Cort, Founder, Apptoto P.S. the “Campaigns” feature is now available to everyone.  Also, sending blasts of messages to your appointments can quickly use up Apptoto messaging credits, so we are adding 200 messaging credits to all paid plans during May, June, and July of 2020 to make it easier to re-open. Have questions about Campaigns? Schedule time to talk with our best-in-classs Customer Support Team. 6 New […]

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Make Rescheduling Effortless with Apptoto’s Appointment Scheduler

We are hearing from clients that many of you are starting to re-open in lieu of the COVID-19 shutdown.  As you begin to re-open, you may want to ask clients who had appointments during the shutdown to reschedule. Or, you might find yourself needing to ask clients to reschedule because of other reasons, such as office closures, staff illness, or late arrivals. Any changes you have can now be made easily in Apptoto’s appointment scheduler.  It doesn’t matter if a client originally booked through Apptoto or if the appointment was manually added by you. You can still ask any client to reschedule. Simply send the ‘Ask to reschedule’ message template to one or multiple appointments, and a new Booking Page will be generated on the fly if one isn’t associated with the appointment already.  Read on to find out how you can control the times they can select from! How to make changes to the appointment scheduler Pick an appointment that you would like to reschedule. Next, click on the “Actions Button” for that appointment. Finally, choose “Send Now” on the “Ask to reschedule next week” item template. The built-in […]

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Introducing “Compose to All” Appointments

Apptoto has had the ability to message multiple appointments at once for a while now. However, doing so required you to manually check checkboxes for each appointment you want to send messages. We’ve received feedback that doing so is time-consuming and error-prone; in response to that feedback, we’ve built a new feature called “Compose to All.” “Compose to All” allows you to easily search for appointments and send messages (text, email, or voice calls) to all of the results at once (without having to check all of the checkboxes). For example, you can easily find all of the appointments in the last seven days on your calendar that include the word “haircut” and send a message to them. The steps are simple.  Log into your Apptoto account, click on the Appointments tab (if you’re not already there), and begin an appointment search. Next, choose the date range you would like to send a message to: Then click the “Compose to All” button to begin sending a message to all the requests. Please note: the “Compose to All” button only shows up on the search results screen in Apptoto.  Also, you […]

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3 Common Appointment Reminder Mistakes And How To Fix Them

While it may not feel like it, making mistakes when sending out appointment reminders is a common problem. So don’t worry, you’re in good company. Many appointment-based businesses treat reminders like a checkbox—either we do it, or we don’t. However, there are common appointment reminder mistakes that could be keeping you from getting the results you need from your reminder strategy. Let’s look at three common mistakes and easy solutions you can put in place: No-shows or late shows disrupt your entire client schedule If your first appointment of the day is 30 minutes late, your entire day can be thrown off. The ripple effect of a late client can change the perception of your business for an entire day’s worth of clients, not to mention causing you to feel rushed for the rest of the day, which increases mistakes and stress. Late arrivals will also cause more late arrivals in the long run. If your clients believe you are always going to be running 10-15 minutes behind, they will start to arrive later and later for their scheduled appointments, believing they have some wiggle room, Solution: If you are […]

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