Seeking Help with Automating Tasks in My Booking App

[constantinos_christo]

Hey everyone,

I’ve recently created a booking app by following this Advanced Booking App tutorial and now I’m looking to take it to the next level. Specifically, I want to automate the following tasks:

1. Send a Confirmation SMS and Calendar Invite:

• When a booking is made, I want to send a confirmation SMS to the client.
• Bonus: Also send a calendar invite via email.

2. Notify the Service Provider:

• Inform the person responsible for providing the service that a booking has been made to ensure they are aware of changes in their calendar.
• Note: This applies only if they didn’t make the booking themselves on behalf of the client.

3. Send a Reminder SMS:

• Send a reminder SMS to the client 24 hours before their appointment.

Challenges I’m Facing

1. Handling Multiple Apps for Sending Confirmation SMS:

• How do I handle sending confirmation SMS for multiple apps?

2. Notifying the Service Provider:

• Push notifications have been unreliable and are throwing errors (see below).
  

  
  
  
  

• I cannot seem to find a way to navigate the user who clicks on the notification to the new booking.

3. Sending Reminder SMS:

• I was thinking of scheduling a Make scenario to run every few minutes, check the booking time, and if it is 24 hours before, send a reminder.
• However, I need to resolve the challenge of handling multiple apps (Challenge 1) before implementing this.

Am I overcomplicating things? What would be the best setup to achieve the above automation tasks efficiently?

Thanks a lot in advance!

[ThinhDinh]

@constantinos_christo

When a booking is made, I want to send a confirmation SMS to the client.

As long as the client has a phone number in your db, you should be able to send them a message using Twilio.

@constantinos_christo

Bonus: Also send a calendar invite via email.

I feel like having a button in the details view of the event would be a good alternative if you don’t want to set up something via the API.

Invite users to an event  |  Google Calendar  |  Google...

@constantinos_christo

Inform the person responsible for providing the service that a booking has been made to ensure they are aware of changes in their calendar.

Should be able to send an email to them, and only send when certain conditions match.

@constantinos_christo

Send a reminder SMS to the client 24 hours before their appointment.

This is a bit tricky. In the future, you might be able to have scheduled automations in Glide, but right now your best bet is to use the Glide API through Make/Zapier, grabbing all rows, and determine which rows are “24 hours before the appointment”, then send a reminder SMS to them.

@constantinos_christo

How do I handle sending confirmation SMS for multiple apps?

If you’re thinking about it as an event after the booking is made (with an action tied to it), then you can just tie a Twilio action to the end of that action chain.

@constantinos_christo

Push notifications have been unreliable and are throwing errors (see below).

I would suggest using email notifications instead.

@constantinos_christo

I cannot seem to find a way to navigate the user who clicks on the notification to the new booking.

If you mean through the notification, then it’s not reliable on iOS as far as I know.

[constantinos_christo]

This was very helpful, thank you very much!