WhatsApp appointment booking and reminders
Endelir takes appointment requests in a WhatsApp chat, lets your team confirm the time from a shared inbox, and sends reminders the customer can answer, while your diary stays where it is. A customer asks for a time, someone on your team confirms it, and a reminder goes out the day before with a way to reply. Endelir handles the conversation and the timing on your business number. The appointment itself stays in the diary or system you already use.
The time is agreed, then nobody hears anything until the day
Most appointments are still arranged by phone. The customer rings, someone writes the time in a book or a calendar, and that is the last contact until they either turn up or don't. Staff spend the afternoon before ringing round to confirm, and every call nobody picks up has to be made again the next morning.
The customer's side is no better. They want to move a Tuesday appointment to Thursday, so they have to ring during opening hours, wait, and explain who they are. It is easier to say nothing and not come, which is how a slot ends up empty with nobody available to take it.
The request, the confirmation and the reminder in one thread
Endelir puts the whole exchange on your business number. A chat flow asks what the customer needs, which branch or person they want, and when suits them, and saves the answers onto their contact record. The request lands in your shared inbox with all of that already written down, so the person confirming is not starting from a blank page.
Be clear about the division of work: Endelir does not hold your calendar. It does not know which slots are free, it does not allocate a time, and it cannot stop two people being written into the same one. Your diary or practice system stays in charge of that. What Endelir does is carry the conversation, send the confirmation, and send the reminder at the hour you choose — either because your booking system calls the Endelir API when the time comes, or because a wait step in the flow counts down from the confirmation itself.
How it works
- 1 The request arrives Someone writes to your business number asking for an appointment — from an ad, a website button, a QR code at reception, or because they are already a customer.
- 2 The details are collected A chat flow asks the questions you would ask anyway: what for, which branch, which person, when suits. The answers are saved onto the contact, not just typed in a chat.
- 3 A person agrees the time Your team checks the real diary and replies with a time in the same thread. The customer never has to ring back to find out whether it worked.
- 4 The confirmation goes out Inside the service window this is an ordinary reply. Later than that, it is a message template Meta has approved in advance, filled in with their date and time.
- 5 The reminder is scheduled Your system calls the Endelir API at the hour you want the reminder sent, or a wait step in the flow counts down from the confirmation. A wait survives a restart and fires once.
- 6 The customer answers it The reply lands in the shared inbox as a normal message and can be assigned to whoever handles the diary that day.
- 7 The booking is updated You change the appointment in your own system. The next reminder is sent from the new details, because it is your system that decides when to call.
What this looks like in practice
A clinic with two branches takes appointment requests on one number. A flow asks which branch, which treatment and whether the morning or the afternoon is better, then hands the conversation to the reception team for that branch. Reception looks at the real diary, offers a time, and writes it in.
The evening before, the clinic's scheduling system calls Endelir for every appointment still standing, and each patient gets a template message naming the branch, the practitioner and the time. Replies come back into the same inbox: some say yes, a few ask to move, one cancels. Reception works through them in one sitting instead of making forty phone calls, and the message carries nothing about offers or treatments the patient did not ask for.
What can happen next
Who this suits
What to know before you set it up
Endelir sends and receives; it does not keep the diary. There is no availability calendar in the product, no slot allocation and no protection against double booking — your own system or your own book decides who gets which hour. If you want reminders driven by real bookings, something on your side has to tell Endelir which appointments are still standing, either through the API or through a flow that started when the appointment was agreed.
A genuine reminder about a real appointment fits a Utility purpose, because it is about a transaction the customer asked for. Adding an offer to the same message changes what it is: "your appointment is tomorrow at 11" and "book another treatment this month and save" are two different messages, and the second one is marketing that needs the customer's recorded opt-in. Endelir enforces consent before a marketing campaign goes out, so keep the two apart rather than trying to make one message do both jobs.
Answering a customer who wrote to you first needs no template. Starting the conversation, or picking it up after the service window has closed, uses a template that Meta has approved in advance — which is what most reminders are, since they are sent the night before rather than in reply to anything. Approval is Meta's decision and takes time, so write your reminder templates before the week you need them.
What to watch
- How many appointment requests arrive on the number
- How many become a confirmed time, and how long that takes
- How many customers answer the reminder at all
- How many ask to move the appointment, and how far ahead
- How many cancel early enough for the slot to be reused
- How quickly a reschedule request gets a reply
- How many arrive without having confirmed either way
Related
Questions people ask
Can customers book appointments directly through WhatsApp?
They can ask for one in the conversation, and a chat flow can walk them through your questions — which service, which branch, which day suits — and save every answer onto their contact record. What Endelir cannot do is hand out the slot. There is no calendar in the product: it does not know what is free, it does not reserve a time, and it cannot prevent a double booking. Somebody on your side, or your own scheduling system, confirms the actual appointment. In practice that means the customer gets an answer from a named person in the same thread rather than a web form and a silence, while the diary stays where it has always been.
Can appointment reminders be sent automatically?
Yes, in two ways. Your booking system can call the Endelir API when a reminder is due, sending the customer's number and the details to fill into an approved template — that is the version to use when the appointment lives in real software. Or a chat flow can use a wait step that counts down from the moment the appointment was agreed and then sends the template itself. A wait survives a restart of the queue and fires once. The one thing worth being plain about: the check that the appointment still exists and has not been cancelled has to happen on your side before the call is made, because Endelir does not hold the booking and cannot know it changed.
Are appointment reminders Marketing or Utility messages?
A genuine reminder about an appointment the customer actually has generally fits a Utility purpose, because it relates to a specific transaction they asked for. Adding something unrelated changes that. "Your appointment is tomorrow at 11 AM" is a reminder; "book another treatment this month and save" is marketing, and it needs the customer's recorded consent. Meta decides how a template is categorised when you submit it, so keep the promotional line out of the reminder and send it separately as a campaign to people who opted in.
Can customers confirm or reschedule from the reminder?
Yes. The reminder is a normal message on your business number, so anything they send back — a word, a sentence, a request for a different day — arrives in your shared inbox against their contact and can be assigned to whoever runs the diary. A template can carry buttons, submitted for approval along with the rest of it, which makes confirming a single tap. Either way the reply is a real conversation rather than a dead end, and the person answering can see what was booked and what was said before.
What happens if an appointment is rescheduled?
Your system holds the booking, so it decides what gets sent. Move an appointment and the next reminder is called at the new time with the new details, because the call comes from the current state of your diary rather than from a list made a week ago. If you are using a flow with a wait step instead, treat that as a countdown that was set when the appointment was agreed: it will fire as scheduled unless your side stops it, so for appointments that move often the API route is the sound one.
Can this work for several branches or staff members?
Yes, as long as the branch, the person and the time are in the details you send. The template is filled in per message, so one reminder can name the Andheri branch and the practitioner while the next names a different one. On the way in, a chat flow can ask which branch the customer wants and assign the conversation to that team, so the reply reaches the people who keep that diary rather than a central desk that has to forward it.
Do reminders reduce no-shows?
A reminder makes it easier for a customer to remember the time, confirm it, or say they cannot come — and a cancellation that arrives the evening before is a slot you can still fill. That is the honest description of what it does. Endelir does not publish a no-show reduction figure, because we do not yet have evidence of our own to publish, and a number borrowed from somebody else's marketing would tell you nothing about your business. Watch your own cancellation and attendance figures for a month or two and you will have a number that is actually yours.
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