Appointment reminders allow you to send an email and/or SMS message to customers to remind them of a currently confirmed status job. This reduces the number of no-shows.
The email and SMS are completely customizable for your own business process. You can decide whether to include a timestamp or not.
SMS Per Credit Charge Notice:
SMS credits are based on message segments.
Plain text uses up to 160 characters per credit.
Emojis, special characters, and personalized fields may reduce the character limit and increase credits used.
For example, using a single emoji reduces the limit to 70 characters per credit.
When an SMS contains Emojis, Accented characters, or Special characters, the system switches to Unicode encoding. This drastically reduces the character limit per segment, resulting in higher credit charges.
Triggers & Examples:
Emojis:
😀,🚀,🔥(Note: Complex emojis like the family icon👨👩👧👦can use up to 8 Unicode characters alone).Accented Characters: Vietnamese tones or letters not in the standard Latin alphabet (e.g.,
á,ạ,ồ,ử,ệ,đ).Special Characters / Smart Punctuation (often from Copy-Paste): Smart quotes (
""instead of", or‘’instead of'), long dashes (—), and ellipses (…).
Character Limit & Segment Rules:
Plain Text (GSM-7): The 1st segment holds up to 160 characters. From the 2nd segment onwards, it drops to 153 characters/segment. (Example: 161 plain characters = 2 segments).
Unicode Text (With Emojis/Accents/Special Chars): The 1st segment holds up to 70 characters. From the 2nd segment onwards, it drops to 67 characters/segment. (Example: 71 characters containing a single emoji = 2 segments).
Tips & Tricks
Excluding a time stamp variable will just show the customer the day of service instead of an exact time.
To create more friction in the rescheduling process, exclude the reschedule button from your email and request the customer to call you to reschedule.
The most commonly used reminder frequency is set at one day before the appointment date.
Reminders can be sent manually from the calendar if you do not want GorillaDesk to automatically batch them out. (When sending reminders manually the system uses template Reminder #1)
A history of all sent email reminders is available under Reports / System email history.
You can send a same day reminder / confirmation by putting 0 on the day/s before.
IMPORTANT NOTE: All sending and automated actions are placed in a queue, meaning they will start executing at 9 AM and should be completed before 11 AM. While e-mails won't all send precisely at 9:00 AM, they are queued to send between 9 and 10 AM, and should not be later than 11 AM.