Send Text Messages to your Customers in Real Time

In addition to sending out pre-scheduled appointment reminders via text messages, our system also allows you to have two-way text message conversations with your customers in real time.

This feature allows you to respond to any inquiries by your customers. It also allows you to do things like allow your customers to send a text message when they arrive at your location.

The screen is setup very similar to a text conversation on a phone. You will see the customer’s name and phone number, followed by a list of inbound or outbound messages.

You can also narrow down the results by specifying a date range, last name, or phone number.

In this tutorial, I will show you a couple of different scenarios for using this feature.

Scenario 1 – Replying to an inquiry from a customer regarding an appointment.

In this scenario, we will go ahead and send out a prescheduled text message appointment reminder to a customer. This reminder could have been scheduled through our web interface, through an import file, or synced through Google Calendar. It doesn’t really matter how the reminder was scheduled and added. However, for the sake of this tutorial I will add it through the web interface.

I will add an appointment for Joe Tester by going to the customers list and narrowing down by last name. Now I can click on the calendar icon to schedule a new appointment. I will go ahead and schedule a text message reminder for an appointment tomorrow at 10 a. m.

I won’t get into how to add an appointment through this tutorial, but if you want more info you can watch Tutorial 1 – Getting Started Sending Your First Reminder

Now that the reminder has been scheduled and also delivered to our customer, we can go to the “Reminders” screen to see the results.

Looks like this reminder was successful. If we click on “More Info”, we can actually see the text content of the reminder itself.

Even though the reminder itself did not ask for questions and only asked the customer to reply 1 to confirm, the customer asked “Are masks required?”.

To go ahead and reply to this question, you can click the SMS icon in this row.

This takes you to a page where you can type and send a text reply.

We will go ahead and send the reply now.

I am going to reply to this customer by typing “masks are currently optional, thanks!”

Then I press “Send Text Message”

After you send the text message, you will be taken to the “Text Messages” screen. You can now see the outbound reply back to the customer.

These messages are read from bottom to top with the most current message on top, unlike a phone where the most recent text messages are on the bottom of the screen.

Scenario 2 – Initiating a text message to a customer without a prior reminder

You can also use this feature to send text messages to customers without even scheduling a reminder. This is handy if you want to reach out individually to someone, or if you just want to send a text message to a customer without sending it from your personal number. The text messages will be sent from one of our internal long-codes instead, that way you don’t need to share your personal cell number with your customers.

Ok, let’s say we want to reach out to a customer just to touch base with them. We can go to the “Customers” screen and find the customer.

Then, click on the “SMS” icon to send a text message.

Go ahead and type your message here and send it

I am going to type, “Hi Joe – This is Jonah from AppointmentReminders.com. I just wanted to check in with you to see how things are going. Just reply to this text f you need any help!”

It’s that easy!

You can check for replies to this in either the “Reminders” screen or the “Text Messages” screen”

As you can see, this feature that allows you to text a customer through the system has several different uses. It’s great for replying to an inquiry that stemmed from text message appointment reminder. It’s also very useful for sending text messages to customers without using your personal cell number.

For more information on this or any other feature in our system, please feel free to contact us by going to https://www.appointmentreminders.com/contact-us/.