Feature Highlight: Automations

Where are you spending the most time in your Health & Wellness business? Is it scheduling, billing clients, writing emails, sending forms? The goal in business, any business, is to automate as many repetitive tasks and processes as possible.

Automation allows you to focus your attention on what matters most, helping your clients reach their health goals. In this feature highlight, we want to make sure you know about a few automations in Practice Better that are designed to save you time, headache and money!

Booking Appointments

One of the first tasks you should think about automating is your booking process so that clients can go online, choose a service, and how and when they want to work with you.

By default, when clients request sessions with you using the Practice Better scheduler, you’ll need to confirm those appointments manually within your portal. We make this the default so you can have full control over your schedule and which clients you choose to work with.

This may not be the most efficient option as your practice grows and you start seeing multiple clients on a daily basis. Instead, you’ll likely want to set up a booking automation to automatically confirm appointment requests. Auto-confirmation of booking requests can be set up for all of your session types or it could be limited to specific services and locations.

For example, If you only want to automatically confirm your Free Discovery Calls or follow-up consultations you can do this. You can even choose to only automatically confirm appointments that are conducted, online, by phone or in-person or sessions at certain sessions at a particular location. Set up your auto-confirm automations for even the most complex scenarios.

There are are a few other booking-related processes that Practice Better allows you to automate:

1. Session Reminder Emails. For sessions scheduled in Practice Better, the system will automatically send out two emails to the booking client. One email will be at the time that the appointment has been confirmed and then a reminder email will go out based on your preferences to remind your client of their upcoming session. These email reminders can be customized depending on the service type that’s been booked so that you don’t have to worry about drafting these emails over and over.
2. Client Portal Access. You can also decide if clients should gain access to the Practice Better Client Portal when their appointment is confirmed. Inviting clients to activate their Practice Better account means that they can access resources that you share with them. Client Portal access will also be required for any online sessions so automating this task will streamline the process of conducting video sessions with new clients.
3. Journal Access. Going a step further, a client who is given access to the Client Portal may also be given full or partial access the Food Journal and/or the Lifestyle Journal. Access to these journals may depend on the service-type being booked and automating this process will save you a lot of time. For example, clients who book a paid service may be invited to use Practice Better and have access to the Food & Mood Journal as well as the Lifestyle Journal.

Send Forms to Clients

It’s not uncommon to have anywhere between 2–20+ forms that you use with your clients at different stages of their health and wellness journeys. How are you going to remember what needs to be sent, to whom and when?

The time-consuming task of sending forms to each client who schedules an appointment with you can, and should, be automated. This matters, not only because there are many opportunities for you to make a mistake but there’s also the client experience to consider. Are they getting their forms at the right time? If it slips your mind to send forms to your client, are they rushing to complete the forms once they actually get them? Are they still giving you accurate information when rushed?

On the other hand, if you send the forms too early for fear that you’ll forget, will the client be able to fill it out? Will they complete the form before doing the work? Will the information in this case be relevant?

Create form automations for all service types that require clients to complete forms. Decide which forms should go out right away once a service has been booked and which ones should be scheduled for closer to their appointment.

For example, maybe initial forms go out as soon as an Initial Consultation is booked, however, Progress Worksheets only go out 2 days ahead of the scheduled appointment.

Automating Payment Collection

Collecting installment payments is another one of those tasks that often takes more time than it should. It should be as easy as possible for clients to pay and for you to get paid. Automatically charge clients at the time that they book their appointments to take one more task off your plate.

You can choose to link either a Stripe or Square account to Practice Better so that payment plans can be built right into the booking process. You can also create custom payment plans for an individual client’s needs.

Once the payment plan has been created, clients will automatically be invoiced or charged, depending on your settings, based on the schedule you’ve created. Receipts will also be sent to clients automatically after an installment payment has been processed.