Lesson 11

Client experience and retention

Notifications: what the client gets, what you get, and when

Messages do not have a switch each. They follow a handful of switches, and the row tells you which one. The timing is yours to set; the wording of the reminder is not.

3 min read · Owner · Getting set up
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Every week someone asks how to stop the booking emails landing in their own inbox, and someone else asks why one client did not get her reminder. Both come down to reading which switch a message follows, and so does the third question, whether the reminder wording can be changed, where the answer is no.

Read the journey, not a list of switches

Settings, Notifications lays every message on a numbered rail, one card per moment in the booking. This is the first card.

  1. Open Notifications.
  2. To read a message and the moment it fires, select Preview on its row on the Booking Created card.

A row with a switch of its own is a setting. A row without one follows a switch named beside it, which is why both confirmation emails go quiet together.

Trap

Email the customer: booking updates is one switch for created, rescheduled, accepted, declined and cancelled, and for receipts, refunds and payment failures. Turning it off to stop one of those stops all of them.

One service can disagree with the account

Most of those switches are defaults. A service that should behave differently is set on its own Notifications tab, not at the account.

  1. Open Services, then Manage on the service and Manage Service.
  2. On Notifications, switch Text you: new booking alert off or on for this service.
  3. Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.

Text you: new booking alert is the team's copy rather than the client's, and it can be off for one service and on everywhere else. The badge beside each label says which is true: green Matches Default means the account's switch still reaches this service, amber Different to Default means it does not.

Tip

The email copy of every online booking is a separate row, Email you: new booking copy, on the Booking Created card. It is set once for the account, so it cannot be turned off for one service only.

The timing is yours, the words are not

  1. Open Notifications.
  2. On Pre-Appointment Reminders, set Reminder Time under First Reminder.
  3. Optional: under Second Reminder, switch on Email the customer: reminders (2nd) or Text the customer: reminders (2nd), then set Reminder Time (2nd).
  4. Select Publish Changes, tick the box in Before You Publish, then select Publish Changes.

Reminder Time is the lead time, and Second Reminder adds one more send at a different one. The only text you write here is the Confirmation Message that Confirmation Reply (Y/N) appends to a reminder SMS; the reminder itself is a fixed template and its wording cannot be changed, here or anywhere else. What does change with each booking is the part the template fills in, so your own service label and your drop-off and pick-up window are already in it.

Pet boarding: set Reminder Time in days rather than hours. The nudge worth sending before a stay lands while they are packing, not on the morning they are already driving over. Dog walking: the pick-up and drop-off texts are a separate switch, set per service, and they fire when you mark the stop rather than on a schedule.

Check

One client missing hers is usually her record, not the account. Open her profile, Settings & Overrides, and read What they receive today. A row marked Override was decided on her, and the account switch above it never applied.