To ensure client attendance, it's important your clients be reminded of their bookings.
General info
When booking online, clients choose whether to receive reminders and if so, by SMS or email; they can choose one option, both or none. The client's reminder preference is saved to their profile.
Reminders are sent via email or SMS*.
*SMS is a feature add-on; to activate, contact your Booxi representative.
Reminders are not sent between 10pm and 6am.
Reminder delay
To set the reminder delay for your business, go to "My Business" tab > Booking Rules > Reminder Delay.
This represents how much time before the booking the reminder will be sent. For example: if your delay is set to 24 hours, your clients will receive the reminder 24 hours prior to their booking start time.
When the reminder delay setting is changed, its value will only be applied to new appointments (i.e. reminders won't be sent for already existing appointments). To update the reminder of a previously booked appointment, you must update its date and time. Scheduled group events will keep their original reminder delay at the time of booking; its delay will be applied to all related reservations.
Additional reminders
You can send an additional reminder to your clients. To do so, activate the "Additional reminder" setting. To access, go to "My Business" tab > Booking Rules > Enable additional reminder.
This setting can be configured for the business (in this case, it will apply to all services) and/or for individual services. This means that you can have a default additional reminder setting for your business and different settings for your individual services.
Here are the different possible outcomes for each setting combination:
Business: ON, Service: OFF
Result: the business' setting will apply.
Business: ON, Service: ON
Result: the service's setting will apply.
Business: OFF, Service: ON
Result: the service's setting will apply.
Business: OFF, Service: OFF
Result: no additional reminders will be sent.
To activate it at the service level, go to "Services" tab > Booking Rules > Enable additional reminder.
Notes and limitations
First and additional reminder messages will contain the same text.
The delivery of SMS messages are subject to the carrier's rules and regulations.
For multi-service bookings, only one additional reminder will be sent, which will be based on the first service's scheduled start time.
If the first and the additional reminder are assigned the same delay, only the first reminder will be sent.
Here's what a sample email reminder looks like:
FAQ
Q: "If I check the SMS or email reminder box for an appointment in which it was initially unchecked (i.e. the client chose not to receive reminders at the time of booking), do reminders get sent?"
A: It depends. If your action was performed before your reminder(s) is scheduled to be sent, it will be sent; otherwise, it won't. Consider these examples: Your reminder delay is set to 2 days.
Case 1: You check the email reminder box for an appointment happening in 5 days. In this case, the reminder (scheduled to be sent 2 days before the appointment) will be sent.
Case 2: You check the email reminder box for an appointment happening in 12 hours. In this case, no reminder will be sent, because it is past the time the reminder is scheduled to be sent.
Q: "Does a client's preferred reminder setting (email or SMS, shown in their client profile) override the option the client chose in the booking widget?"
A: No, it doesn't. The choice the client made in the booking widget will be respected. Consider this example: John's preferred reminder setting is email reminder. John books an appointment using the booking widget, and when doing so, keeps the email reminder option unchecked.
In this case, John will NOT receive an email reminder, since the system honors the choice he made when booking.
Q: [related to above] "What impact does the client's preferred reminder setting have?"
A: The client's preferred reminder setting provides the default behavior when creating a booking for the client. In other words, whenever a staff members creates a booking on behalf of the client in the Calendar tab, the reminder checkboxes will follow the client's preferred reminder settings. Notwithstanding, these settings can be changed in the booking creation window.