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Reminders and notifications will be sent for all bookings, in line with your reminder and notification settings. If you have noticed that an email or SMS reminder or notification hasn't sent as expected, there are a few things you can do, which we will cover in this article.
Confirm your reminders are enabled
The first thing on the list might be a bit of an obvious one, but it's worth a quick check! Especially if you've made changes to your reminder settings recently, as these may be disabled, or set to another time frame. For more information, see our help guide How to set up client reminders.
Check individual customer reminder settings
By default, clients will receive reminders and notifications in line with your business settings. However, it's possible for individual clients to have their own reminder settings, if they would like to be sent reminders at a different interval, or via a different method. If you've noticed reminders for a specific client aren't sending, then you can check their reminder settings.
Click edit on their customer record, go to the notifications tab and check/update their settings. For more information, see our help guide How to adjust client SMS and email settings.
Check if the clients SMS number or email address is valid
It's worth a quick check to make sure the client has a valid SMS number or email address. For example: do they actually have contact details listed, is the listed information in the correct format etc.
Timely can only send SMS messages to the country you operate from, so we add the international prefix to the customer's number. If there is a prefix added, or the "0" is included, you will need to remove those from the number. You can confirm by editing an appointment from the calendar and checking the SMS number and/or field.
Check your SMS settings
The default setting for restricting the sending of SMS messages to customers, is set to between 8:00AM and 9:00PM (SMS time restrictions). This is to prevent customer's receiving unwanted or disruptive messages in the middle of the night. No SMS messages will be sent outside of this time period. For more information, see our help guide How to adjust your SMS and email settings.
For example: If an SMS is created at 9:30PM, this won't be sent until 8:00AM the following day.
Check when the booking was added
- If you have your SMS set to go out 1 day prior at a set time, then the booking must be added to the calendar at least 24 hours before the appointment start time.
- If you add an appointment for 10am on Friday at 1pm on Thursday, the customer wouldn't be sent a reminder - even if your SMS reminders are due to be sent 1 day prior at 3pm.
- If a reminder won't be sent to the customer based on these rules, there will be a notification shown in the appointment history. For more information, see our help guide How to view your clients appointment history.