The Full Slate Blog

You can now further customize the pages your clients see when they schedule appointments with you.

The last button clients click when they book an appointment says, by default, “Schedule Appointment”. Wish it said “Schedule Session”, “Book Appointment” or “Book Now!”? Now you can make it say anything you want. Mobile businesses might use “Schedule Visit”. Room reservation businesses might use “Reserve Room”. Get creative and use what works best for your business.

You can also change the “staff” label to anything you like. Maybe you want it to be more specific to your business:  “Therapist”, “Stylist”, “Counselor”. Or maybe you’re using staff to schedule resources:  “Room”, “Booth”, “Vehicle”.

Just go to Setup > Booking Details to change either of these fields. Your changes will automatically show up on your landing page, website widget, and Facebook page.

We’ve seen you use Full Slate in so many ways! Now, combined with ‘look and feel’ stylization, month/week view, custom fields, and other customization options, you have more ways to personalize your scheduling pages to really meet the needs of YOUR business.

It’s now easier than ever for clients to schedule appointments from their mobile phones. Your Full Slate landing page now recognizes when a mobile phone is used and renders your client scheduling pages in a mobile-friendly format.

When a client accesses your landing page (which is your custom scheduling webpage at http://yourbusiness.fullslate.com) with an iPhone, Android or other smart phone, available times are formatted to fit the screen size of a mobile phone and organized by day, making it easy to browse for the time that works best. Once your client finds they time they want, it’s easy to select it using their phone’s touch screen. No resizing. No horizontal scrolling. Just some quick browsing and the appointment is booked.

If you’d prefer that clients schedule directly from your website, we recommend using the javascript widget for optimal scheduling on mobile phones. The iframe widget isn’t supported on some phones, so if you use it on your website, we suggest also including a link to your landing page for mobile scheduling.

And don’t forget, if your clients are always on the go, you can send them text message (SMS) reminders too.

Easy scheduling on the go makes for happy clients and more appointments!

Now you can schedule appointments with clients faster than ever on your mobile phone. Recent improvements to Full Slate Mobile let you quickly browse for openings and schedule appointments.

To schedule an appointment on your phone, go to the Schedule tab and browse for openings; these are easy to find and specify the amount of time available. So if you need to schedule a one-hour service, you can quickly find openings that are at least that long. When you find an opening that works for your client, click on the opening — the day and time will pre-populate on the appointment details page. Just select the service and client from the drop downs and you’re done. With the new “in-schedule” booking, appointments can be scheduled faster and with greater accuracy than ever before.

Not already using Full Slate on your mobile phone? Check out the benefits here. If you have an iPhone or Android phone, just type “https://fullslate.com/mobile” into your phone’s browser, log in to your account, and Full Slate will be with you wherever you go!

Account administrators can now set email and SMS alerts for all staff members so they can be notified of new appointments scheduled by clients or other staff members.

Do some of your staff need help setting up new appointment alerts? Or do you not want to invite certain staff to log in to your Full Slate account? Now it’s easy to set up alerts on their behalf.

Just go to Setup > Staff and click on a staff member’s name. You can turn on email alerts or SMS (text message) alerts, or both…and you can define when they’ll receive the alerts. You can also establish whether they receive alerts when other staff members book on their schedule, or only when clients do. And for staff members with the Schedule Manager role, you can let them receive alerts for appointments scheduled on all staff schedules.

Only staff members with Administrator access (not those with Schedule Manager and Employee roles) can set alerts for other staff members.

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!