🚨 Important - This feature is currently in beta and is not widely available in Dentally.
What is the difference between booking confirmations and appointment confirmations?
Automatic booking confirmations are slightly different from appointment confirmations. Automatic booking confirmations send within 10 minutes of booking, to confirm the date and time booked. Appointment confirmations send before the appointment date, asking the patient to confirm they will attend.
What are booking confirmations?
Booking confirmations let you automatically send patients an SMS, email, or both with their appointment details when a booking is made or moved. You can choose whether you are prompted each time, or whether messages are queued without any action needed.
How to enable booking confirmations?
Booking confirmations must be enabled in your settings in order to be sent. The default for all practices is that they are enabled and set to prompt you every time, but this can be changed at any time.
Go to 'Settings' > 'Automation'
Find the 'Booking confirmations' section at the top of the page, above your automation rules.
Click the toggle in the 'Booking confirmations' row to enable or disable.
When the toggle is off, no messages are sent and no pop-up appears when booking.
Only Level 4 users can configure booking confirmations.
You can then control how confirmations are sent - either automatically for every booking, or with a prompt after each booking is made, asking if you wish to send a confirmation.
If 'Send confirmations automatically' is ticked, confirmations will be fully automatic.
Whenever an appointment is booked, or the start time/date is moved, a confirmation message will be sent after 10 minutes, using both SMS and email with the templates you have chosen.
No prompt to send will appear on the calendar when booking an appointment.
If one communication channel is not possible for a patient (eg. they don't have a mobile number on their patient record), confirmation won't be sent via that channel even if automatic confirmations are enabled.
If 'Send confirmations automatically' is not ticked, confirmations will not be sent automatically, and you will be prompted after every appointment is booked/moved.
A window will appear immediately after you book or move an appointment. From here you can configure how you'd like the confirmation to be sent. It will then be queued for 10 minutes before sending.
📝 Please note: The 10-minute send delay applies for both automatic and prompted confirmations, allowing you to make changes without sending the patient multiple messages in a short space of time.
How do I select which templates is used in booking confirmations?
In your booking confirmation settings:
Ensure booking confirmations are enabled.
Once enabled, use the dropdowns to select an SMS template and an email template. These will be set to the Dentally templates by default. You can use these or change as you wish.
Select 'None' if you do not wish to use this channel to send booking confirmations.
Make sure you click 'Save' after making changes to apply these to your account.
