Tekmetric

Automatic Messaging for Appointments – Tekmetric

Tekmetric Marketing allows shops to automatically send customizable email and SMS appointment confirmation and reminder messages—with personalized details and adjustable timing—to customers booking online or in-app, helping reduce no-shows and improve communication efficiency, while also enabling customers to confirm or cancel appointments via text.

What Is It?

When using Tekmetric Marketing, you can set up automatic confirmation and reminder messages via email or SMS text messaging for appointments made online using Tekmetric Online Booking or in-app within Tekmetric. These messages help increase customer satisfaction, reduce no-shows, and improve shop efficiency.

How Does It Work?

When a customer books an appointment, they immediately receive a confirmation message with the appointment details. Text messages appear in the Tekmessage thread for the customer, keeping all communications in a single thread. You can customize the text and the delay of reminder messages as well.

Editing Your Messages

Within the 'Automations' tab of Tekmetric Marketing, you can edit the appointment confirmation and reminder messages sent to your customers.

To begin, select 'Setup' to open the editing modal. Here, you can edit the text of both SMS and email messages to suit your shop's brand and personalize the message using personalization variables. The available personalizations are:

  • First Name
  • First Name & Last Name
  • Vehicle Make & Model
  • Vehicle Make, Model & Year
  • Appointment Date & Time (formatted as MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM AM/PM)
  • Appointment Date (formatted as MM/DD/YYYY)
  • Appointment Time (formatted as HH:MM AM/PM)
  • Shop Name (from Shop Settings > Shop Name)
  • Shop Phone Number (from Shop Settings > Business Phone)

For reminder messages, you can choose when the message is sent using the 'Send reminder before appointment' setting.

To completely turn off any automation, toggle off both delivery methods in the 'Edit' screen. This will disable notifications for appointments made online and within the app.

Reminder messages can be customized to be sent whenever you like. It is recommended to set up at least one 24-hour reminder message to reduce no-shows.

How customers can cancel or confirm their appointment via text:

By selecting "Include appointment confirmation reply options," customers can confirm or cancel their appointment via text. When a customer receives their appointment reminder, they can confirm by replying "Yes" or cancel by replying "No." These changes will be reflected on your appointments calendar. Any other message responses will appear in your Tekmessage thread as normal. If there are multiple appointments for a customer, the nearest appointment will be impacted. Appointment reminders will not be sent for any appointments marked as 'Arrived' or 'Canceled.'

Messaging for Appointments Made Inside Tekmetric

When making appointments inside Tekmetric, you can choose whether to send an appointment confirmation or reminder for each appointment. Turn these toggles on to set the confirmation and/or reminder for the appointment you're working on. The default setting matches the settings within your 'Automations' tab inside Marketing. If they're on, they'll be on here.

It is recommended to turn off confirmations and reminders for follow-up work or when adding appointments to your schedule when you already have the car at your shop.

Important note: When turning on the Reminders automation for the first time, existing appointments will not have reminders automatically enabled.

Quiet Hours and TCPA Compliance

All reminder messages adhere to TCPA quiet hours and are sent between 9AM-8PM, based on your shop's timezone. This applies every day of the week, including weekends.

How reminder timing works:

  • Reminders are calculated backward from your appointment's actual start time, based on your automation setup.
  • For example, a "1 day before" reminder for an 8:00 AM appointment will be sent at 9:00 AM the day prior.
  • If a reminder would fall outside quiet hours (before 9AM or after 8PM), it will be sent at the nearest compliant time instead.

Note for all-day or multi-day appointments: If an appointment has a start time set as 12:00 AM, reminders will use 12:00 AM to calculate when to send the reminder. Since this falls outside quiet hours, the reminder will automatically adjust to send at 8:00 PM the previous day instead, keeping your communications compliant and customer-friendly.

Example: If you have a 1-day appointment reminder, any all-day or multi-day appointments will send out appointment reminders at 8:00 PM 2 days in advance. If the appointment is booked for Friday, the customer will receive the reminder on Wednesday at 8:00 PM.

Troubleshooting Message Send Times

Text messages say "tomorrow" for the customer's appointment, but they received the text 1 day early before their appointment slot?

This occurs because many shops edit their text template for the "Appointment Reminder - 1 Day" automation, including the word "tomorrow" in it. Due to Quiet Hours and TCPA Compliance, texts do not always go out exactly 24 hours before the appointment. Therefore, it is not recommended to use 'tomorrow' or specific days like "Wednesday, Friday, etc." in reminders. When appointment reminders get pushed to a different date, it ends up incorrect. It's better to use the "Appointment Time" tag by itself in the message template.

How to Fix It:

  1. 1.Go to your Marketing area.
  2. 2.Open the Automations tab at the top.
  3. 3.Click the edit pencil on the "Appointment Reminder - 1 Day" reminder.
  4. 4.Click "Show message" for the text template.
  5. 5.Remove the word "tomorrow."
  6. 6.Save.