Reminders and Confirmations — What’s the difference?

Simple Salon is designed to send your clients SMS & Email Reminders and SMS & Email Confirmations—but what’s the difference?

Every now and then our Help Desk agents hear questions like, “How come my clients have received two SMS reminders?” Well, your clients haven’t actually received two reminders, but rather one SMS Confirmation, and one SMS Reminder.

You know when you’re on the appointment page, and you are booking a client in? Well, while you’re in the Select Services window choosing the clients’ services, just before you click Confirm to build the appointment there is a tick box that says Send Email/SMS To Client. This tick box is what sends the SMS/Email Confirmation, and that confirmation is sent to the client then and there. The SMS/Email Confirmation reads like this:

Hi Barry! Your appointment at Salon X on 07/09/2015 @ 2:00 PM is CONFIRMED! Tel: 0390001234

Notice that it is confirming the appointment, it’s not a reminder. This is also the same template used for the confirmation SMS or email, which is sent to the clients when they book appointments online.

Now, the SMS/Email Reminder is the one which is sent automatically a day or two before the clients appointment. This is the one which is setup in your SMS & Email tab, in Admin. The SMS/Email Reminder will read something like this:

Hi Barry! Your next appointment at Salon X is on 07/09/2015 @ 2:00 PM. Tel: 0390001234. Reply Yes to confirm

This one is the SMS Reminder, which also allows the client to reply ‘Yes’ to confirm their appointment. When they reply ‘Yes’ to their SMS Reminder, the letter ‘C‘ for Confirmed will automatically display on the clients’ appointments.

Now that you understand the difference, you can understand that if you have the automatic SMS/Email Reminders enabled, then you actually don’t need to be ticking the Send Email/SMS To Client tick box when you are booking appointments. The only time when you might want to tick this option is when you are making an appointment for a client who is coming in later that day, or early the next—basically only if the client has missed the round of automatic SMS/Email Reminders, which have already been sent for the day that their appointment is on.

Click here to see how you can turn on your automatic appointment reminders, so that you no longer need to be ticking that box when you’re making appointments.