Appointment reminders now fit your own template
Pick your approved reminder template and fill in each of its variables — with this booking's own date, time, service, staff or venue — instead of a template that had to have exactly four.
Your reminder template can have whatever variables you wrote. Pick it from your approved templates and say what goes in each one.
What's new
- Choose the template from a list instead of typing its name. Only approved templates appear, because a reminder arrives long after the conversation went quiet and WhatsApp will only carry an approved one.
- A box for every variable it has — numbered (
{{1}}) or named ({{name}}), plus a header or a URL button's parameter if your template uses them. Type into a box to send the same words every time. - Type
{{in any box for this booking's own values — when it is, the day, the time, the service, who it is with, where it happens, the customer's name, and the booking code they already have. Times read in the timezone the booking was taken in. - A fallback for a booking that has nothing to put there — write
{{appointment.staff|our team}}and bookings with nobody assigned still read properly. - A half-finished template is not sent. The step tells you which boxes are empty and the review row says "template unfinished", instead of a reminder that quietly failed three days later.
What changed for reminders you already set up
Nothing, until you touch them. A reminder template named before this existed keeps sending exactly what it sent: the customer's name, the service, when it is, and your workspace name, in that order. The moment you pick the template from the list, those same four appear in the boxes as a starting point, and from there you can change them.
Why it matters
The step used to ask for the template's name and nothing else, so we had to assume every reminder template took those four values in that order. A template with two variables, or named ones, or a header image, was refused by WhatsApp every time — days after the booking, with only the email going out. Now the template you actually approved is the template we send.