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 or WhatsApp
One channel per appointment, never both.
- 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 in your business's timezone, and two links: view the appointment, and reschedule or cancel it.
- WhatsApp when there is no email address at all. That is the usual case for someone who booked by chatting: they rarely leave an email.
Email wins whenever it can, because it is free and carries the full detail. WhatsApp exists to reach the customers email never reached.
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).
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, anyone booking that service is asked:
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.
The question is asked on both paths — the bot asks it in chat, and it appears among the service questions on the Booking Page.
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. Reading a number wrong means messaging a stranger, so the rule errs on the side of staying quiet.
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 what makes them possible at all: a customer who booked days ago has no open conversation on your number when the reminder comes due.
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 is available in Spanish. A customer who wrote to you in English is not sent one — 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 for a reason that has nothing to do with the appointment: permission is re-checked right before the reminder is due, not only at booking time. If a service's Ask for permission to send the reminder switch is turned off afterward, or consent is otherwise withdrawn, a reminder armed only by the number the customer gave while booking quietly cancels — the appointment itself stays exactly as booked. A reminder armed instead by an inbound WhatsApp conversation is untouched. A "Cancelled" reminder 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 — shown in red with a warning icon, because it is the one that needs your attention. A reminder that has not resolved roughly an hour past its due time reads Not confirmed instead — neither Sent nor Not delivered, because at that point the system genuinely cannot tell whether it went out. An appointment still loading this information reads Not available yet; one with no reminders configured reads No reminders — so an unknown status is never mistaken for "nothing was sent." The same wording appears when you export the list to CSV. Nothing proactively alerts you when a reminder fails — this column and the export are the only places to find out.
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.