Customized Appointment Reminder Timing Options
When setting up your Apptoto account, you may ask yourself – how will Apptoto fit my unique workflow? In most cases, the default reminder templates provided by Apptoto will be all you need to get started. These basic reminder templates are built to alert a client to the start time of their appointment as it is shown on the calendar. However, timing can often be more complex than that.
For example, you might have clients who need to come to their appointments early to fill out paperwork or get settled. Or, if you are in the service industry, you may want to provide an arrival window to your clients, as opposed to a specific time. These are just two of the specialized timing reminders that Apptoto can send for you! Apptoto utilizes the Liquid Templating language to allow you to customize the messages that are sent.
Read on for instructions to help you set up your Apptoto account to send your reminders in the exact way you need for your clients in no time at all!
What if you need your client to arrive early for an appointment?
With a simple template change you can tell Apptoto to remind your clients to show up to their appointment 15 minutes (or whatever timing you need) ahead of time. This can be helpful if you have appointments where you need the client to fill out paperwork or in general require the client to arrive prior to the time designated on the calendar.
In the example shown on the right, the reminder refers to both the start time on the calendar and a message to show up 15 minutes before.
Here’s how you would set up this kind of reminder:
Here’s the template you can use to create this type of reminder:
Appt Reminder: {{event.day_and_time_phrase}} with {{user.name_and_company}}. Please arrive at {{ event.start_time | add_minutes: -15 | date: “%l:%M %p” }} to fill out paperwork. {{reminder.prompt}}
What if you need your client to know the time range of their appointment?
In many cases, Apptoto users like to not only remind their clients of the start time of their appointment, but also include an end time. This is most commonly used to let clients know the length of their appointment. However, this can also be useful if your client just needs to show up for an appointment at any time within a time range. Apptoto will look at your connected calendar and find the bookend times of a scheduled appointment to then remind the client to arrive for or in that time range depending on how your business is set up.
In the example below, our calendar has two appointments scheduled and the reminders to the clients will be between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM for Suzie’s appointment and between 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM for Fred’s consultation.
For this setup, you would replace the default field {{ event.day_and_time_phrase }} with {{ event.day_and_time_range_phrase }} in the Apptoto Auto Message Editor.
You can find all of the time field options by clicking on “Insert Field” and hovering over the “Event” menu.
What if you need to provide an estimated appointment time for your client?
Another way you can make use of this time range feature is if you have clients you see in the morning or afternoon, but that won’t have a specific arrival time. Or, if you are in the service industry and need to give a time range to a client for a delivery or arrival time.
You can make use of Apptoto’s Auto Message Conditional Blocks (ie. rules) to accomplish this sort of message set up. Apptoto will still look at the start time of the appointment on your calendar, but will then use the set conditions by you to find the customized message to send.
In this example, we tell Apptoto to look at the appointments before 12:00 PM (using the event.time_hour field) and remind the client of an arrival window for you or one of your employees between 8:00 AM and 12:00 PM. This will let your client know you could arrive at any time within that time range. For afternoon appointments, we tell Apptoto to provide an arrival window of 12:00 PM and 5:00 PM to the client, if the appointment was scheduled anytime after 12 PM. Here’s how the conditions and messages would look in the auto messages editor.
Once you have set these conditions for the Auto Messages, you can then create message templates to automatically fill in the times to match your service or arrival windows. For example, you could create a “Morning” message that would use the set time window of 8am-11am or whatever you need it to be.
As you can see, Apptoto is a very robust reminder system that can do so much more than simply reminding your clients of the start time of their appointment! If you want to explore customizing your auto messages further, please refer to our manual located here: automatically sending auto messages. But also, don’t hesitate to visit our support center at apptoto.com/support if you have further questions, find yourself stumped along the way, or want to try to brainstorm a clever new solution that will help ensure Apptoto is working for your business and workflow! We are happy to help you via email, chat, or helpdesk tickets anytime!
