Stop Arranging Appointments by Text Message

Most bookings that never happen are not lost to a competitor. They are lost to a conversation about times that ran out of steam.

"Are you free Thursday?" "Not Thursday, how's Friday afternoon?" "Friday I could do after three." "Ah, I'm picking up the kids at three." Four messages in, spread over two days, and the person who was ready to book on message one has cooled off by message five. Nobody said no. It just quietly stopped.

The fix is not being faster at replying. It is not being in that conversation at all.

Start with what somebody can book

The unit here is a booking type: one specific thing a person can book with you, with its own length, price, hours and link.

That distinction does more work than it looks. A free fifteen minute discovery call and a paid ninety minute session are two booking types with two links and two sets of rules. They never get muddled, because you never send the same link for both.

Three shapes to choose from. A one to one for a personal appointment. A service for the work you sell. A group or class for something with a set number of seats.

Set your rules once

Availability is a schedule you build once and reuse. Change your hours in one place and every booking type using that schedule changes with it, which matters the week you decide to stop working Fridays and do not want to edit seven calendars.

Three settings do most of the protecting:

• Buffers between bookings, so you are not finishing one appointment as the next one starts. Travel, notes, a cup of tea.
• Minimum notice, so nobody books you for forty minutes from now while you are driving.
• How far ahead people can book, so your diary in eight months is not already carved up by strangers.

Get these right and the booking page stops being a thing you have to supervise.

Approval, for when you need to vet

Some work you cannot let anybody book unseen. Turn on approval and bookings arrive as requests instead of confirmations, and nothing is locked in until you say so.

Use it where the job varies wildly or the client needs qualifying. Leave it off everywhere else, because every extra step between wanting to book and being booked costs you some of them.

Take the money at the booking

You can collect payment when somebody books, either the full price or a deposit.

A deposit does two jobs. The obvious one is cash before you start. The one people underrate is that somebody who has paid turns up. A free booking is a plan. A paid booking is a commitment, and the difference between those two shows up in your no show rate immediately.

Connect Google and it works both ways

This is the part that makes online booking safe to leave running.

Connect your Google account under Calendars, then Connections, and two things start happening. Your existing Google events block those times on your booking page, so nobody can book on top of the school run, a dentist appointment, or a meeting somebody else put in your diary. And every confirmed booking is pushed to Google automatically, so it is on your phone and your watch without you copying anything across.

Each person connects their own account, so conflicts and pushes are per person rather than one shared view of a team that does not really share a diary.

Round robin, so a full diary stops turning work away

If you have a team, set a calendar's assignment to round robin and tick who shares it. Bookings spread across them, each one going to the free member with the lightest load.

The important behavior: a slot stays open as long as at least one member is available. So the business stops losing work because one person's Tuesday is full. Each booking checks against and syncs to that member's own Google calendar, and the appointments list shows who it landed with.

Your link says what it is

Every booking type gets its own public link built from your business name and what the booking is called. A booking type called Free consultation at Incredible Hypnotist becomes a link ending incredible-hypnotist-free-consultation.

Rename the booking type and the link follows along, so it never ends up describing something you stopped offering a year ago. Want something shorter, type it in yourself, and from then on it stays exactly as you left it.

The part worth knowing: changing a link never breaks anything you have already shared. The old address keeps working and forwards to the new one. Buttons on your website, links in old emails, whatever a client bookmarked, all still land in the right place. So you can tidy up your links without auditing every place you have ever posted one.

The emails you would never remember to send

Confirmation, reminder and reschedule emails go out on their own, each one in the recipient's own timezone rather than yours.

Stack a reminder a day before and another an hour before. Those two emails do more for your no show rate than anything else on the screen, and they are the ones a busy person never gets round to sending by hand.

The one thing to be careful with

On the appointments list you can change a booking's status, or delete it.

Delete removes it from the record for good and emails nobody, and it also pulls the event off the linked Google calendar. That is right when a booking was a test, or a duplicate, or spam.

It is wrong when a real client is involved. If somebody should be told, set the status to cancelled instead. Delete is for tidying up your own mess, not for cancelling on a person.

The bit that makes it worth more than a booking tool

Here is the difference between this and a standalone scheduling app.

The person who books becomes a real contact record. Not a row on a booking report. Name, email, phone, and the appointment attached to them, sitting in the same contacts list as everybody else who has ever dealt with you.

Which means that in a quiet week you can pull up everybody who booked in the last ninety days and email or text them an offer, from the same place you took the booking. A booking tool gives you a calendar that fills up. This gives you a calendar that fills up and an audience that grows while it does.

Build one booking type today

Not your whole diary. One.

Take the thing people most often message you to arrange, make it a booking type, connect your Google calendar so your real life blocks it out, add a reminder a day before, and put the link in your Instagram bio and your email signature.

Then the next time somebody asks if you are free Thursday, you send a link instead of a question, and find out on Friday morning that they booked at eleven o'clock at night while you were asleep.

Start your free trial of ClientBranch and get your booking link live today.