Appointment reminders
Every booking reminds the customer on its own before the appointment starts — the ones your bot takes in chat, the ones made through your Booking Page, and the ones your team enters by hand. There is nothing to schedule: reminders are armed the moment the booking exists, and they move or disappear on their own when the appointment changes.
This is not the confirmation. The confirmation goes out at the moment of booking; a reminder arrives later, close to the appointment.
When they go out
Two per appointment:
| Reminder | When it arrives |
|---|---|
| Day before | 24 hours before the appointment starts |
| Last hour | 1 hour before the appointment starts |
A reminder whose moment has already passed is never sent late — it is simply skipped. So a booking made five hours out gets the one-hour reminder and nothing else, and a booking made half an hour out gets neither: the confirmation just went out with the same details.
Email, WhatsApp or both
Each reminder goes out on every channel the customer can be reached on:
- Email whenever there is an address — the one the customer typed while booking, or the one already on their record. It carries the date, the start and end time, and two links: view the appointment, and reschedule or cancel it.
- WhatsApp when there is a permission and a number (see below).
A customer with an email address and a WhatsApp permission gets both.
The time is written in the customer's timezone when the appointment knows it — the bot works it out from their phone number, or the customer says it — and in your business's when it does not.
What makes a WhatsApp reminder possible
Permission, and a number that can actually receive it. Either of these is enough:
- The customer reached you over WhatsApp and wrote to your business at least once.
- The customer gave their WhatsApp number while booking, when asked (see below).
- Your team typed the customer's WhatsApp number when adding the appointment by hand.
A phone number sitting on a customer record is not permission on its own — a number typed into a form does not prove there is a WhatsApp account behind it.
Asking for permission while booking
Path: sidebar → Commerce & Services → Service Management → edit a service → WhatsApp appointment reminder, with the switch Ask for permission to send the reminder. A real-estate account does not list Service Management in its sidebar at all — see Real Estate Mode.
It is on by default, per service. Turn it off for a service where the question does not belong, and bookings for that service stop asking.
With it on, the question is asked like this:
- In chat, the bot asks: Would you like a WhatsApp reminder before your appointment? If so, reply with your WhatsApp number including the country code (for example +1 708 555 1234). If not, just reply no. Someone already writing to you on WhatsApp is not asked: they already have permission and get the reminder anyway.
- On the Booking Page it is a checkbox on the contact step: Send me a WhatsApp reminder before my appointment at followed by the phone they typed.
- On an appointment added by hand, it appears among the form's Checkout Questions so your team can type the number.
It can never block a booking. Ignoring it or answering no leaves the appointment exactly as it is.
Only an unmistakable answer counts as permission: one full international number, with the + and the country code, either alone or with a plain yes. A national number without a country code, a number wrapped in a doubtful sentence, or two different numbers all record nothing, and the customer simply gets no WhatsApp reminder. If they answer just "yes" in chat, with no number, the bot asks for it once more.
Permission belongs to that appointment. If the same person books again, they are asked again.
Which number it comes from
WhatsApp reminders are sent from ReadyChatAI's number, not from your business's WhatsApp. That is how they can arrive even when the customer has not written to you in days.
That number is not monitored, so if the customer replies to the reminder:
- they get an automatic answer saying so, with the link to view, change or cancel their appointment, and your business's WhatsApp number so they can talk to you;
- their message does not land in your Messages inbox.
If they reply STOP or unsubscribe, they stop receiving appointment reminders. Their appointment stays booked — unsubscribing is not cancelling. It also opts them out platform-wide: their profile in Messages shows an Opted out badge, and there is no toggle in the dashboard to reverse it.
Email reminders honour the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, the same one the booking confirmation uses.
The WhatsApp reminder exists in Spanish and English, and goes out in the customer's language. A customer who wrote in another language is not sent one on WhatsApp — if they left an email address, they still get the email reminder as usual.
What moves or cancels a reminder
| When the appointment… | The reminders… |
|---|---|
| moves to another date or time | move with it |
| is cancelled | are cancelled |
| is marked completed | are cancelled |
| is deleted | are cancelled |
A WhatsApp reminder can also cancel without the appointment changing: permission is re-checked right before it is sent. If the service's Ask for permission to send the reminder switch is turned off afterward, or consent is withdrawn, a reminder armed only by the number given while booking cancels — the appointment stays as booked. One armed by an inbound WhatsApp conversation is untouched. A "Cancelled" next to a confirmed appointment usually means this, not a mistake.
Checking whether a reminder was actually sent
Path: sidebar → Commerce & Services → Appointments → the Reminders column. In a real-estate account that sidebar section is named Real Estate instead — see Real Estate Mode.
For every appointment, it lists each reminder with its channel, its timing ("24 h before" / "1 h before"), and a plain-language outcome: Sent, Scheduled, Sending, Cancelled, Not sent (too late), or Not delivered — in red with a warning icon: it is the one that needs your attention. One that has not resolved roughly an hour past its due time reads Not confirmed: the system cannot tell whether it went out. An appointment still loading this information reads Not available yet; one with no reminders, No reminders. The same wording appears when you export the list to CSV, and the same reminders show on each appointment's detail page.
Besides that, every reminder sent on WhatsApp is written into that customer's conversation in Messages, as an automatic Appointment reminder notice — only when the customer has a WhatsApp conversation with you; email ones are not logged. Nothing proactively alerts you when a reminder fails: you have to look here.
When nothing is sent
- A chat booking the customer started and never finished. It is not a real appointment yet, so it is not reminded — once they finish it, the reminders are armed.
- No email address and no WhatsApp permission.
- The customer unsubscribed from reminders, or is blocked.
- For WhatsApp only: no name on file for the customer, or they wrote in a language the reminder is not available in yet.
None of these ever stop the booking itself. A reminder that cannot be sent is silently skipped; the appointment stands.