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:
- Confirm your reminders are enabled.
- Individual customer settings.
- Is the SMS number or email valid.
- Check your SMS settings.
- SMS sending window.
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.
Confirm your reminder settings
Need help? Check out our How to send automated appointment reminders guide.
Check individual customer reminder settings
By default, customers will receive reminders and notifications in line with your business settings. However, it's possible for customers 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 customer 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:
Check a customer's settings
Need help? Check out our How to set individual reminder settings guide.
Is the SMS number or email address valid?
It's worth a quick check to make sure the customer's has a valid SMS number or email address. Does the customer have an SMS number or email address listed? Is the number/email a valid address, in the correct format?
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:
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Check your SMS settings
By default all of your SMS and email messages will be sent after a 10 minute delay. This is to prevent a customer (or staff member) from receiving multiple messages if a series of changes are made to an appointment one after the other.
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 example: If an SMS is created at 9:30PM, this won't be sent until 8:00AM the following day.
Update my SMS delay and time restriction settings
Need help? Check out our How to adjust your SMS and email settings guide.
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Check when the booking was added
The basic rule of thumb is that if the appointment is added after the time the reminder would have been sent, then a reminder won't be sent. At a minimum, a booking must be added to the calendar
at least 24 hours before
- the appointment time.
- 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.
Need help? Check out our How to view appointment history guide.
If none of the above options explain issues with your SMS or email reminders and notifications, then get in touch with us by submitting a Help Form at our Help Centre.