Appointment reminders, and website chat on every plan
Appointment reminders, and website chat on every plan
Customers get a reminder before their appointments, website chat is on Free with a WordPress plugin, and you pick which notifications reach you.
A reminder before every appointment
Meerlume now reminds customers of a confirmed appointment ahead of time, with a button to cancel and, where your rescheduling rules allow, one to reschedule. Every calendar starts at 1 day before; pick 2 hours, 2 days or Off on the calendar's General tab.
Telegram and WhatsApp get the reminder in the chat; on WhatsApp, a customer who hasn't written in the last 24 hours gets a template message that Meta bills to your WhatsApp account. On Messenger and Instagram, Meerlume can only send it within 24 hours of the customer's last message, so outside that, and always on website chat, it goes by email if the customer gave an address. Once a booking's reminder time has passed, the booking in the calendar shows whether it went out, and why not when it didn't.
Website chat on every plan, Free included
Website chat is now part of the Meerlume Free plan, so a bot on Free can answer on your own site as well as on Telegram. On Free the chat carries a small Meerlume mark, and removing it now starts at Starter instead of Growth.
On Free, emails to customers, such as booking updates and reminders, use Meerlume's standard English wording, up to 30 a day and 300 a month; Starter and above keep your own wording with no account limit. The Terms and Privacy Policy were updated on September 26 to match: they cover these sending limits and rule out using Meerlume to email people who never contacted you.
An official WordPress plugin for website chat
Meerlume is now in the WordPress plugin directory. Search for Meerlume under Plugins → Add New Plugin, paste your bot's chat code under Settings → Meerlume, and the website chat shows as a bubble on every page, or inside one page with a shortcode, without editing your theme.
How the chat looks and what it says stays in Meerlume, so there is nothing to set up twice, and the Website chat tab in your bot's settings now has a Using WordPress? row with the code ready to copy.
Choose which notifications reach Telegram and email
Settings → Notifications in the Meerlume dashboard has a new What reaches you table: for each channel you have connected, tick the events it gets, from requests to approve and new submissions to booking changes, a customer asking for a person, live chat replies and payments. Everything stays on until you turn it off, and the bell always gets everything.
Alerts that a bot is broken can't be switched off, and there are two new ones: a Telegram bot whose token was revoked in BotFather, and a Stripe key that stopped working, which used to leave customers at a payment step failing without a word to you.