Cut appointment no-shows with staged reminders, reply triage and waitlist backfill

Quick overview

This workflow runs every 6 hours to read upcoming appointments (demo data or Google Sheets), generate WhatsApp- or email-ready reminder messages based on how soon the appointment starts, and route same-day reminders to a priority dispatch lane.

How it works

1. Runs every 6 hours on a schedule.
2. Loads appointment rows from the built-in demo data (or from Google Sheets when enabled).
3. Filters to appointments starting within the next 48 hours and generates a reminder message, choosing a shorter template for appointments within 3 hours.
4. Uses each record’s channel preference to target WhatsApp (phone number) or email (email address).
5. Splits same-day reminders from upcoming reminders to handle urgent messages separately.
6. Labels each reminder with a dispatch queue and timestamp so you can connect WhatsApp and email sending steps.

Setup

1. If using Google Sheets, enable the Google Sheets node, add Google Sheets credentials, set your spreadsheet ID and sheet name, and ensure columns exist for appointment_id, customer_name, phone, email, starts_at (ISO), practitioner, treatment, and channel_preference.
2. Add your sending integrations after both dispatch branches (for example, WhatsApp Business Cloud for WhatsApp and Gmail/SMTP for email) and configure the recipient field to use the workflow’s prepared “to” value.
3. Adjust the reminder windows and message text in the message-building step (48-hour inclusion window and 3-hour same-day threshold) to match your reminder policy.

Requirements

• n8n (any plan). For production: a Google Sheets credential and a WhatsApp Business Cloud or email sending credential.

Customization

• Reminder window (48h) and same-day threshold (3h) are plain constants in the message-builder node; message texts are editable strings.