Video: Setting Up Appointment Reminders

Hi, Damien here from Zanda. In this video, I want to show you how to set up a configure, your appointment reminders.

Setting Up Automatic Reminders

0:11 You start by going to settings, and then over here, you go to communication, then reminders. So, I'll click on that.

0:19 On this page here, you'll see the various options you have available. First of all, you can toggle your reminders on or off.

0:25 Um, overall, also if you're talking about that off, it will turn off reminders for your entire account. Maybe you might do this if you're firstly that pure account but not yet using it.

0:33 Perhaps you don't want reminders to go out and just yet. Most of the time, of course, you have those toggled on because appointment reminders are amazing and make a massive difference to your attendance rates.

0:44 Okay, you'll see there are three different reminders that you can send for each appointment. So you can configure both the template that is sent and the timing very simply.

0:54 So you just select the template. So in this example, I've got an SMS reminder template going out one day before the appointment and then I've got email Reminders going out three and seven days before now you can change the timing of that you can also change the Template that you use or you can edit the

1:10 template so if you just click on the little icon here, you can change the Template content Okay, I'm just gonna go back

Setting Up Manual Reminders

Here I'm gonna slide over to this section and and you've got a couple of further options here.

1:24 There are circumstances where you may want to send a one-off reminder to a client. Let's say they're ring up, they book an appointment, they ask you to send the information to them straight away.

1:33 Instead of having to write an email or manually type out an SMS, you can actually just configure some templates to be used in those circumstances.

1:42 Most of the time, people will actually just use a standard appointment, a reminder SMS when the appointment will remind an email, but you can change that if you would like to.

Setting Up New Appointment Confirmation

1:51 Finally, you'll see a new appointment template. So you have an option here to have a SMS or an email get sent to the client anytime a new appointment is made for them or if they do it by the client portal.

2:08 And this just ensures that they have a copy of those appointment details. So most of the time people actually just leave it to be the appointment reminder, but you can actually change the template or if you didn't want that at all you can just change it to select the message and when there's no template

2:23 selected that's the same as saying don't send that and don't send that that reminder so if you just left it like that means they wouldn't get any message immediately when an appointment was made.

More Appointment Reminder Settings

2:35 Okay let's slide back over here you'll see you have an option here to toggle on. Reminders being sent on a Friday instead of on the weekend.

2:43 So if you, for instance, had a client with an appointment on a Monday, instead of that, that would might have been sent out on the Sunday, which, you know, might mean that they get it when you're closed.

2:53 You can toggle this and all the appointments that would have gone out on the weekend, they actually brought forward and sent out on their Friday instead, meaning that if they do reply or need to change, you actually have the time to make the most changes.

3:07 Down here then we have a setting to automatically cancel the appointment when a client replies no or cancel to an appointment reminder.

3:16 So in your appointment reminder you may ask them to reply with yes or no to cancel. However you can turn this off so that if they replied no that it won't actually cancel.

3:30 If you turn that on it means if they were to reply no or cancel then the appointment will actually show up as cancelled in your calendar.

3:40 Now of course you want to make sure that your SMS reminder actually matches the content or that setting so here we've got please reply yes to confirm I've just turned that setting on so we might change that to say or no to cancel just so the message is consistent like unsafe okay so now I'm going to

4:03 go over and have a look at what that looks like so those settings we just looked at were really about how to set up the reminders for your entire account that sort of controls the behavior of all reminders in your account.

4:15 But you can actually customize this now at an individual appointment level or also at a client level. Let's look at an appointment level first.

4:23 You'll see here Damian demo, so that's someone that I set up for myself, very creative, I know. If you look over here, you'll see we've got some options, so we can actually turn the reminder off for an individual appointment and that will mean a reminder will not be sent or you click on this bell icon

4:39 and you can actually send an SMS reminder or email reminder immediately. That's that scenario I was talking about that perhaps the person has just made this appointment and they want to have the reminder sent them straight away so they have the details and you can do that.

Viewing Client Replies to Reminders

4:56 Okay also looking at the behavior of the reminders if we click sorry apologies if we click on the messages up here you'll see this Damien demo so prior to filming this I sent a reminder using the system and then as the client I replied yes and that meant that the appointment actually changed to this green

5:20 confirmed status. Now if the account was set to allow people to counsel via no and I had sent a reminder or I'd to apply, no, as the client, then it would actually change the appointment to a read status.

Setting Up Individual Appointment Reminders

5:36 So that's that. Finally, I'll show you how you can configure the behavior of reminders for an individual client. So I'm going to double click to get into the client's profile and I'm going to go under profile and click on appointment reminders.

5:49 Here you can change and edit the templates that are being used for this particular client and you can change the timing of this as well.

5:59 So this will override the overall settings that you set for your account and ensure that this client receives the combination of SMS reminders that you would like or email reminders that you would like and the timing that actually suits this particular client.

6:14 So you'll see here that I'll set up this client. So they'll only receive SMS. So for instance imagine this client says look I never use email maybe an elderly person doesn't check their emails or doesn't have email you can actually ensure that instead of them getting emails which really they won't ever

6:30 see you can actually turn that off and we'll ensure that this is the behavior the system will use when dealing with reminders for that particular client.

6:41 Okay that's it for setting up and configuring your appointment reminders. Thanks again for watching and please to go ahead and watch further videos in this series.

6:51 Thank you, bye.