Reminders and follow-ups

Start with reminders only

Turn on appointment reminders first. Most clinics start around 24 hours out; some add a same-day nudge. Look at your no-show pattern before you copy a competitor’s timing. If people forget mid-week afternoon visits, a 24-hour WhatsApp or email reminder helps more than a last-minute panic ping.

Pick channels you already have working - email, WhatsApp - based on plan and market. Don’t enable WhatsApp reminders if WhatsApp signup isn’t finished; you’ll get silent failures that look like “customers are flaky.”

Read a few reminder deliveries in Conversations or your messaging logs. If the text reads like a billboard, rewrite it. Time, place, how to reschedule. That’s enough.

Then unfinished-booking follow-ups

Only after reminders look sane, enable nudges for people who started chat or a call and never finished booking. Those messages recover real intent - but they feel pushy if the copy is salesy or if you fire them ten minutes after someone said “I’ll think about it.”

Give people breathing room. A gentle follow-up later the same day or next morning beats three messages in an hour. If someone explicitly said no, don’t let a recipe argue with them.

Quiet hours and the rest

WhatsApp-heavy orgs and evening-heavy US call centers both get burned by late texts. Set quiet hours before you celebrate open rates. Your brand reputation is not worth a 0.5% lift at 11:40pm.

Save re-engagement and post-visit notes for later. Post-visit feedback is useful when short. Re-engagement to “idle” customers can wait until you trust the earlier recipes - otherwise you’ll train people to mute you.

Enable one recipe. Watch Conversations for a few days. Then add the next. That is the whole playbook. Stacking every automation on day one is how both staff and customers start ignoring the product.

Related guides

• Go-live checklist for first bookings - The go-live order we recommend when a new org wants chat live today and phone soon after - without skipping calendar truth or hours.
• Train on websites and documents - How website crawl and document uploads feed every AptaBook channel - and how to spot stale content before customers hear the wrong answer.
• Embed the chat widget - Snippet install, mobile checks, CSP traps, and how to tell booking failures apart from chat widget failures before you blame the model.
• Set up inbound voice - Get a business phone number, short greeting, handoff rules, and the after-hours test call you should not skip.