SMS feature live

The new SMS (text message) is live for everyone to enable.. or not. It's off by default of course but you can enable it under "my account" > "company details".

Note: only admins can access this screen and turn it on/off.

As a reminder, here's how the feature works:

• a text message will be sent to client profiles with a valid north american number
• the number used to satisfy the above criteria is the one in the "cell phone" field
• a reminder will be sent on the previous evening or late afternoon for appointments the next day in the morning
• a reminder will be sent in the morning for appointments in the afternoon / evening on the same day
• the text of the reminder is as follows: "Appointment reminder: BUSINESSNAME DATEANDTIME local time. See email for details. No reply."

We may still tweak this feature further but at this point we're confident enough to make it available to all that want to enable it.

Customer support 2.0

Just a quick note to let the world know that we've updated our support system to include (at last!) direct email communications both ways. So from now on you can start a support request via any of our contact forms or by using our support email (support at instant-scheduling dot com).

Rules you need to respect (or else):

• for new issues, questions or suggestions send a new email (with whatever subject) or use the contact forms
• for things related to a previous inquiry, just reply to our email (don't use the contact forms and don't change the subject of the email)

Customer support

Because people sometimes wonder why we do not offer phone support as an option, we thought we could post an answer here as opposed to our usual one liner.

The reasons for this choice are not immediately obvious so let's explore a bit:

• email support allows us to provide a complete audit trail of every support interaction (both incoming and outgoing) so we can refer to previous inquiries easily
• quicker turnaround as some questions can be answered in no time using predefined responses (commonly asked questions or common setup issues). This translates to lower costs (that benefit everyone) and quicker responses for you
• since everything is in writing you can easily refer to our instructions and do it at your own pace (or re-read should you later on come across the same issue)
• no need to schedule an appropriate time to call you back or hold you on the phone when we need to research something or perform additional troubleshooting
• sometimes we need to include web links or even, god forbid, raw HTML code. Clearly, doing this over the phone is shall we say, not very convenient
• we can automatically tie into our support system to pull your account information and a summary of your settings.. this is definitely a huge plus

We still have a few things to improve with our support process however, such as allowing you to directly email us and reply to support tickets.

Embedding without the top banner

Here's one little undocumented feature you might find useful when embedding the scheduler within your own website.

First things first, let's see how we would easily do that with an iFrame:

<iframe src="https://instant-scheduling.com/sch.php?kn=123456"></iframe>

So the above is going to help you add the scheduler to your webpage. Now you may want to remove the top banner (with your business name and description) since this is probably redundant on your website. Here's what you need to change to make it happen:

<iframe src="https://instant-scheduling.com/sch.php?kn=123456&nobanner=Y"></iframe>

Note the &nobanner=Y that we added to the link. That's all it takes :)