I need to send a follow-up message a few days after a customer visits
Plenty of businesses have a message that has to go out a few days after something happened. A clinic sends aftercare notes on day one and day three following a procedure. A garage reminds customers about the next service. A salon asks how a treatment turned out a week later.
They all share one shape: one reference date, then a message on day N. The Reminders menu does it for you.
How to use it
- Open Reminders in the dashboard.
- Fill in the name, the WhatsApp number, and the reference date, for example the date of the procedure. A short note is optional, the package name for instance.
- Click Schedule. That is it, there is nothing left to remember.
The list below the form shows everyone currently scheduled along with their next send date. If someone cancels or no longer needs reminding, click Stop.
You choose the hour it goes out
Above the list of rules there is one setting: what time reminders are sent. That single hour applies to every rule, and it defaults to 09:00 Jakarta time.
It is not decoration. With no hour set, reminders go out at the first opportunity after midnight, and your patient receives aftercare instructions at 00:15. The date is right and the timing is embarrassing.
Pick an hour that suits your business: a morning clinic usually wants 08:00 or 09:00, a shop that opens late might want 10:00. If our gateway is disrupted at exactly that hour, the reminder still goes out once it recovers. Late, not lost.
The sending rules are yours to set
A rule decides which template goes out how many days from the reference date. You create them yourself on the same page, as many as you need.
- Give the rule a name you will recognise, such as "One month follow-up".
- Pick a template from the list. Only templates already approved by Meta appear there, so a mistyped name is not possible.
- Enter the day offset and click Add rule.
The offset may be negative, and that is what makes one feature serve very different businesses:
- 30 — follow up a month later. Sales teams use this for a prospect who asked to be contacted again next month.
- 1 and 3 — aftercare instructions on day one and day three.
- 180 — a service reminder half a year on.
- -1 — remind someone of an appointment the day before it. For this pattern the reference date you enter is the appointment date itself.
A rule can be switched off at any time without deleting it, and a rule that has never sent anything can be deleted outright. One that has already sent deliberately cannot be deleted, only switched off: deleting it would take its send records with it, and a similar rule created afterwards would message people who already received it.
Templates that use the name. If your chosen template has a single
{{1}} placeholder, it is filled with the recipient name. That is why the name is
required when scheduling someone. Templates with two or more placeholders cannot be used here:
the name is the only thing we know about the recipient, and guessing the rest is worse than
refusing up front.
Why it has to be a template
A message sent more than 24 hours after the customer last contacted you must be an official Meta template. That is WhatsApp policy, not ours. A day-3 reminder is clearly past that boundary, so its wording has to be built as a template and approved by Meta first, which usually takes a few hours to one working day.
While the template is unapproved, sending fails and the failure is recorded. It is not retried endlessly, because a rejected template does not change its fate by being attempted repeatedly.
What we protect you from
Never twice. One person will not receive the same reminder twice, even if our system restarts or is updated mid-schedule.
Not lost to an outage. If sending is delayed by a technical problem, the reminder still goes out once service returns, hours late rather than never. But a reminder whose due date passed more than 14 days ago is not resurrected, so that entering old records does not trigger a mass send to people who finished long ago.
Already have your own system?
This menu is built for businesses that do not have one, so a receptionist can simply type it in. If you already run a point of sale, patient record, or ERP system, do not use this page. Send from your own system through the API instead, so there is no double entry and nothing gets missed.