Setup Appointment Reminders

Hi, Damien here from Power Diary. In this video, I’m going to show you how to set up and configure your automatic appointment reminders.

Configure Automatic Appointment Reminders

So to do that we head over here to ‘Setup’ and we click on ‘Configuration’ and ‘Reminders’ and that will bring us to this page here [‘Reminder Settings’].

So client appointment reminder settings, you can have up to three reminders that go out ahead of time for each appointment and you just set the template that you would like to use so the content of the reminder and the timing – ie how long before the appointment you would like it to be sent. That can be anywhere from one day, all the way to 7 days prior to an appointment. And you can choose different templates to send, so different messages to send. So perhaps, if you are sending email reminders 7 days ahead of time, you could just let the person know that there is an appointment coming up in 7 days and to make sure they have that booked in and scheduled. So like I said, up to 3 reminders.

Editing Appointment Reminder Templates

You can edit the content of the reminder or the template by clicking on this little pencil symbol here. This will actually take you to the underlying template that is being used and you can edit these. You can also add new templates so if the ones that your account comes pre-configured with are not suitable, you just go to this ‘Tools’-> ‘Communication’->’Templates’, and I will show you right here, you can then just add a new template and then that will become available for you to use for reminders. So if we were creating an SMS template, click ‘SMS’ and save that.

So I will just jump back now to the reminder configuration. It is just asking me [pops up a message ‘Leave site?’] to make sure we can leave without saving.

Manual Appointment Reminders

Okay, a couple of more options I want to show you on this page. So over here [‘Reminders Settings’] we’re talking about reminders that are triggered automatically but there might also be circumstances where you want to manually trigger a reminder. The system needs to know ahead of time, what makes it easier anyway, if you are triggering an SMS or email reminder which template you would like to be sent. So this allows you to predefine “Hey, I’m sending a reminder manually” and you can do that anytime from the main calendar page. Then it knows what template you can actually use.

You can also select a template that is sent to clients whenever a new appointment is created. So you might create a template to say “Just confirming you have a new appointment booked for this time and date” and the system will automatically send that.

Appointment Reminders on Weekends

Now, if we head over here [toggle buttons at the bottom of the page], you’ll see a couple of other options.

We have ‘Appointment reminders that would be sent on the weekend are sent on Friday’, so what this allows you to do is, if you toggle this and save, it means let’s say you have appointment reminders that are going out one day prior to the appointment so for a client that has an appointment on Monday if the reminder setting was one day ahead, they would actually get that reminder on Sunday. If they needed to cancel that appointment then them contacting you on Sunday may not be that helpful. So you have the option here to have all the reminders that are due to be sent on the weekend to be actually sent on Friday. And that means that if they needed to change it would have a much better chance that they will contact you about that during business hours instead of them trying to contact you on a Sunday.

Automatically Cancel Appointments when Clients Reply ‘No’

The other option we have here [‘Automatically cancel the appointment when clients reply ‘No’ or ‘Cancel’ to an appointment reminder’ toggle button] is that the system can automatically process the response to SMS reminders. So if a client replies ‘YES’ or ’NO’, or ‘CONFIRM’ or ‘CANCEL’, for instance, the system can actually read that and update the appointment. So it can show that the appointment has been confirmed, for instance, if they replied ‘YES’ or if they replied ‘NO’ or ‘CANCEL’, it can cancel the appointment and notify the clinician and your admin team. So, it has the capacity to do that but if you don’t want it to be automatically canceling appointments or confirming them, you can actually just toggle this here to ‘OFF’ and ‘Save’. And that way the system won’t automatically cancel appointments if the person replies ‘No’ to the reminder.

Birthday messages

A couple of other things I’ll quickly mention here, and these aren’t so much about automatic reminders for appointments but other functions or key dates if you like that the system can generate and show you a list of.

So reminding you about client birthdays, so you can toggle that on and you can have a birthday message that is preset to be sent to them.

Reminder for Recurring Appointments

You can have a reminder when a recurring appointment is about to finish so again you can toggle that on and that way you can be alerted to that or you can be reminded when a client uses the last appointment, perhaps in a set of appointments that they have booked or a session pack, so there are some really handy features to help you stay on top of the administrative side of managing a practice. If we have a look at it because this is really setting the way you want your account to work at an account-wide level.

Configure Reminders for Individual Client

If you want to drill down, we can actually change the way that reminders operate for individual clients because the setting that you use across your account may not be suitable for a particular client. So if we go to Jackie for instance, here I’m going to double click Jackie to go straight into her profile, it’s just a shortcut. We can go here to ‘Appointment reminders’ and we can change this.

So let’s say Jackie lives in an area where there is very poor cell reception or mobile reception, we can change a reminder to an email and perhaps she needs to know four days out so we can just add that reminder setting just for her, so she is not receiving the same reminders as everyone else.

Reminder for a Particular Appointment

The other thing you can do is, I’ll just click at the Power Diary logo to get us back to the calendar page, but you can actually adjust the way a reminder works for a particular appointment. So let’s say, here we’ve got Jackie, we can see there’s a bluebell to indicate that a reminder will be sent. We can see over here [‘Reminder’ toggle button in ‘Appointment details’] that indicates the reminders. Let’s say for some reason we don’t want that reminder sent for that particular appointment. We can just toggle right off and we see a reminder will not be sent. The reason that we would do this and perhaps Jackie happened to phone the day before about something else and just confirmed on the phone that she was coming to that appointment then maybe we don’t need a reminder to go out to Jackie as well to remind her of that appointment. So this allows you to turn it off for that appointment but then for her next appointment, it will resume as normal.

Okay, that’s it from me for this video. Thank you for watching!