How to setup booking confirmations
Specify when and how your customers receive booking confirmation requests. You can automatically send your customers a text and/or email to confirm their booking ahead of time. This will ease your day to day by reducing no shows and improving sales. You can manage confirmations, reminders, and email notifications from the Communications tab within your account center.
Note: Booking confirmations are only available with a paid subscription.
Manage Your Booking Confirmation Settings
You can adjust when text and email confirmation requests are sent, and turn the functionality on or off.
Step 1: Navigate to the Communications section of your account center.
Step 2: Toggle the Confirmation Request to on (It should be blue).
Step 3: Click on the edit icon to adjust the settings for the Confirmation Requests.
Confirmation Settings
Confirmation SettingsMethod
There are three methods available for sending requests. Email, Text Message or Email and Text Message.
Note: Sending confirmation requests with a text message requires the Text Message addon. You can purchase the addon from within the Start Booking Marketplace.
When
This is how you define the amount of time before your bookings that you want the confirmation to be sent. The available options are:
- 2 Hours Before
- 4 Hours Before
- 6 Hours Before
- 8 Hours Before
- 10 Hours Before
- 12 Hours Before
- 1 Day Before
- 2 Days Before
- 3 Days Before
- 4 Days Before
- 5 Days Before
- 6 Days Before
- 7 Days Before
Message
You can customize the message that gets sent to your customers. The default message is "Hi [customer], please confirm your booking with [account] on [date]."
The dynamic variables in this sentence will be replaced with the relative information. For example, let's say your customers name is Sam Smith, your account name is Max Fitness and the booking is was June 12th at 9am. The confirmation would read: "Hi Sam Smith, please confirm your booking with Max Fitness on 6/12 at 9:00 AM."
The available dynamic values are:
- [customer] = The customers full name
- [account] = Your account name
- [date] = The date and time of the booking
- [user] = The users full name thats assigned to the booking
Note: We will automatically attach the confirmation link after the message, you do not need to add anything to your message for that.
Step 4: Click Save.
The Confirmation Request Experience
Once you have enabled and configured your confirmation requests, Start Booking will automatically start sending notifications based on the schedule you defined. Your customers will receive a email or text message that contains a link to confirm that they plan on attending the booking. That link will send them to a page that looks like this:
By simply clicking the link, the customer will be marked as confirmed. They do not need to do anything extra on this page. If for some reason they need to undo their Confirmation, they can click the Undo Confirmation link on the page.
As a logged in user, there are multiple indicators to identify that a customer has confirmed the booking. Below is an overview for each of them.
On the appointment and class details pages, you'll see a gold indicator appear in the Activity Log.
On the appointment list screen, you'll see a variety of dot indicators next to each booking. The gold indicator is communicating that the customer has confirmed the booking. The black indicator is the appointment has been cancelled. The green indicator is that the customer has been checked in. These different indicators only appear if you're using those features.
Lastly, on your calendar you'll see the same indicators to make it easy to see who's confirmed.
