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

Entries by Frank Cort

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Improving Online Booking 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 availability easily? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you’re in luck! 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 and can be used to easily block off available time on your booking pages for specific dates or date ranges. Availability Overrides can also be used to expand available times on specific dates as well! 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 online booking schedule and prevent any new appointments from being created. Or as another example, if you are planning on coming in earlier on a specific Friday, you can easily adjust your availability for online bookings on that specific day by creating an override with an earlier start time. “Availability Overrides” can be […]

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How Appointment Reminders Can Improve Customer Satisfaction

Appointment reminders are a valuable tool 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 in turn 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 […]

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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 […]

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Best Practices: Automated Appointment Reminders for Healthcare

Missed that appointment reminder? That’ll be $50, please. No-shows and late arrivals are common problems for many healthcare service 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 the 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 prior to their appointment through automated appointment reminders and confirmations to make sure they show up, without any heavy lifting required for you or your staff. You can easily set-up customized appointment reminders for your healthcare practice using these tips and tricks. Concerned about HIPAA compliance? Learn more about our 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 having more people show […]

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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 just 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 regularly Skype sessions to learn a new language. We had a chance to discuss the software with Spanish55 co-founder Abraham Arechiga, who shared some of the lessons that their business has learned and how they’ve used Apptoto to reduce their no-shows by one-third. 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 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 Reference Manual Page for Zoom Integration. 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 Re-open/cover in 2020

Appointment based businesses were some of the hardest hit during the world-wide COVID-19 economic shutdown.  Now, as the world begins to re-open, it’s important that you (as the owner or manager of an appointment-based business) recover as quickly as possible 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. Better Appointment Search Filtering We’ve added search “Chips” that let you quickly choose a date range while searching […]

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Adapting to change using the Apptoto appointment scheduler

Introduction 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 find that you want to ask clients that 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, late arrivals, etc. Any changes can now be made easily in Apptoto’s appointment scheduler.  It doesn’t matter if the appointment was originally booked through Apptoto, or if it 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, click on the “Actions Button” for that appointment and choose “Send Now” on the “Ask to reschedule next week” item template. The […]

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Introducing “Compose to All” Appointments

Apptoto has had the ability to compose a message to multiple appointments at once for a while now; however, it has required you to manually check checkboxes for each appointment that you want messages to be sent to.  The feedback we’ve received is 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 7 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 […]

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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. But 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: Appointment reminders prevent no-shows and late shows 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 running late, […]

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