Appointment Reminders

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ricmorin
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Appointment Reminders

Post by ricmorin »

We love the appointment reminder texts. Coupled with Mitchell's CRM email reminders, we almost never get a no show. We are running into a slight issue though. We hope there is a remedy.

With 5 loaner cars, we often have work that may be here for days. That work likely gets bumped on the schedule to accommodate for more pressing matters. Because Message Manager uses the Starting time to know when to send the text, we often get duplicate reminders for the same vehicle after moving a scheduled item. If Message Manager used the Drop Off time, this would not be a problem.

Mitchell CRM had a similar problem and fixed it by adding the Drop Off field. Can Message Manager use this field instead? Or is there another workaround you may suggest?
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by Auto Repair Coach »

Another one to look into.
Will let you know.
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by ricmorin »

We've found a pretty good workaround for this. Since bumping appointments usually happens at the end of a day, we set our reminder to be 2 days out. That way, a bumped appointment is below the threshold of being sent. Works so far but would really like the reminder to be based off of drop-off time.
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by Auto Repair Coach »

Noted. I'll check on previous posted request.
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by motley06 »

We created a customer named Carry, Over with a 1990 Alfa Romeo and no cell number. We use that customer file to block off time for the next day and no reminder gets sent out to a customer who already dropped their car off.
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by ricmorin »

motley06 wrote:We created a customer named Carry, Over with a 1990 Alfa Romeo and no cell number. We use that customer file to block off time for the next day and no reminder gets sent out to a customer who already dropped their car off.
Great idea, we do the same when 'some' of the work is done, but move the entire block when 'none' of the work got done.
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by motley06 »

ricmorin wrote:
motley06 wrote:We created a customer named Carry, Over with a 1990 Alfa Romeo and no cell number. We use that customer file to block off time for the next day and no reminder gets sent out to a customer who already dropped their car off.
Great idea, we do the same when 'some' of the work is done, but move the entire block when 'none' of the work got done.
Pretty much exactly how we do it. When that 4:00 PM oil change turns into a cv axle, brakes, shock, and filters, we put 'Carry, Over' on tomorrow's schedule and block off the time for the remaining work
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by Auto Repair Coach »

That's a great idea. I did put it in development also.
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by Importbry »

We are running into the same issue, has been confusing for some customers. We even had one show up to pick up their car because they did not read the text message.. We have tried everything from setting the status in the appointment to arrived and to confirmed. We have actually turned off the reminders to avoid the confusion. Has their been a update or better resolution than a place holder? One idea we are going to start trying is to make a shop event for the time with the customers name as the title..
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by Auto Repair Coach »

Happy Thanksgiving Ric. thanks for all your input.
I'll see where we are with this and let you know.
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by ricmorin »

Nearly 2 years later and we still have this problem. Please tell us there is a fix in the works.
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by Auto Repair Coach »

We are planning on doing some refreshing of our software during the remainder of 2020. Your requests are in the queue.
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by ricmorin »

I'm not a big fan of your vote-for-features website, but I need to tell you that you have at least one duplicate in there. It's hard to identify vote tallies with duplicates. My request here, which dates back to 2017, is number 4853. While looking through the requests, I discovered that request number 3108 is the same feature. Please merge these so the tally can be correct. And please tell me that some work has been done on this. It's an easy fix. Simply point to the drop-off time. Done.

Edit: request number 1107 also duplicates this.
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Re: Appointment Reminders

Post by Auto Repair Coach »

Thanks for this input. It's items like this that need to be dealt with to make the feature voting que better.
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