The Full Slate Blog

Introducing text message appointment reminders to clients! Now, in addition to sending email reminders, you can send appointment reminders right to your clients’ mobile phones via text message (SMS). Email reminders have proven to reduce no-shows by 35% and, with three out of four adults sending and receiving text messages today, it’s critical to reach your clients wherever they are. You might consider setting up an email reminder to be sent one or two days before appointments and a text message reminder to be sent six or twelve hours before appointments.

To set up text message reminders, go to Messages > Automatic Messages, add an ‘Appointment reminder’ and select the text message / SMS template. You can even customize the language in the text message, including placeholders to dynamically change the message.

We’re releasing text message reminders as a ‘beta’ feature, so please let us know if you have any feedback on the service. The feature is free while in beta and — because we pay a third-party SMS service to ensure text messages are reliably sent every time — will be a premium feature after the beta ends. If you choose to use this feature at the end of the beta, it will cost only $3/month on the single-schedule plan, $5/month on the 5-schedule plan and $8/month on the 10-schedule plan.

Thank you to everyone who requested this feature!

Now you can dynamically add provider names to email templates — such as appointment confirmations and reminders — so your clients know who their appointment will be with. To include the provider’s name in appointment-related emails to clients, just add the {provider name} placeholder to include the first name of the staff member or the {provider full name} placeholder to include the first and last name of the staff member.

For example, take the following sentence in the ‘appointment confirmation’ email template: “Your appointment with {provider name} on {day} at {time} is now booked.” If the appointment is with staff member Emily, the client email will read “Your appointment with Emily on Friday, July 15 at 10:00am is now booked.”

Check out this blog post to learn more about using placeholders in email templates.

If you have more than one provider in your business, be sure to check out this new feature!

The new schedule ‘zoom’ lets you expand your Full Slate calendar to better see appointment details and navigate a busy schedule. If many of your appointments are 30 minutes or shorter, you’ll love the ability to see your schedule three times its regular size. On these shorter appointments, you can now see the client, service, start time and end time. And it’s even possible to schedule appointments as short as five minutes long with appointment details visible when you hover over the appointment.

You can find the new zoom feature under the ‘more’ button on the Schedule tab. Thanks to everyone who requested this great feature!

Clients can now add new appointments to their calendar with a single click from their appointment confirmation email. An appointment file, known as an .ics file, is included in every ‘appointment confirmation’ and ‘accept appointment’ email to clients, so all they have to do is click on the file and the appointment is automatically added to their default calendar, such as Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar. This works whether your client schedules the appointment or you do.

Not only is this a great convenience for your clients, but, just as reminder emails can help reduce no-shows, so can easily adding the appointment on their everyday calendar!