There are perhaps five messages a booking business genuinely needs to send: you are booked, something changed, this is happening tomorrow, this was cancelled, here is what to do next. Each of them saves a phone call, and one of them — the reminder — quietly pays for itself in the appointments people would otherwise forget. Everything beyond those is marketing, which is a different job with different rules.
Confirmations are sent by hand until the day nobody does, and the customer arrives for a booking that was cancelled.
The messages that follow a real event: a confirmation when a booking is made or accepted, a note when a time changes or something is cancelled, a reminder before the appointment or the pickup, and where your process needs it, a message to the team as well as to the customer. It suits a business that wants fewer phone calls without becoming a business that sends people things they did not ask for.
It is not a marketing platform. There are no campaigns, no newsletters, no audiences and no promotional sequences. It does not measure who opened what in order to profile anybody, and it is not a chat system: a reply is a conversation between your customer and your business, not a ticket queue.
Three failures, and two of them are about sending too much rather than too little.
A customer sends a booking request and hears nothing. Within a day they have either phoned to ask or gone elsewhere, and both outcomes cost more than the message would have. What they need to know is short: we have it, and here is what happens next.
No-shows are mostly forgetfulness, not malice. A reminder the day before turns a large share of them back into attendance, and it only works if it is automatic — a reminder somebody has to remember to send is not a system.
When operational messages start carrying offers, customers stop reading them, and the confirmation that mattered goes unopened with the rest. Keeping the two apart is what preserves the value of the important ones.
Four decisions, and none of them are technical.
Confirmation, change, cancellation, reminder. Add one only when a customer would otherwise phone to ask, and remove any that nobody has ever thanked you for.
A day before an appointment, a morning before a pickup, an hour before a class: the timing depends on what somebody has to do to be ready. One well-timed message beats three.
Messages can go out through your own email so they come from your business, land in the right place and can be replied to. Where that is not set up, a fallback keeps the messages moving rather than dropping them silently.
The default text is a starting point, not a voice. The confirmation is often the first written thing a customer receives from you, and it is worth sounding like the person they spoke to.
Three things, and the third is the one nobody thinks about until it fails.
A notification exists because something happened to a booking: it was confirmed, it moved, it was cancelled, it is tomorrow. Nothing is sent on a schedule of its own.
Where you configure your own mail, the customer sees your business rather than a platform, and replies reach you. The relationship stays where it belongs.
If your own mail is not configured or is failing, the message still goes rather than disappearing. A notification that quietly did not send is worse than one that never existed, because everybody assumed it did.
A reminder on a Thursday, and a change made in the morning.
A customer booked three weeks ago and forgot. The reminder the day before arrives while they can still rearrange their morning, and the appointment happens. The alternative is an empty hour and a conversation about a no-show fee.
The engineer’s first job overruns, so the second is moved by an hour. The customer is told when it changes rather than when the van fails to arrive, and the day recovers instead of collapsing.
A notification travels outside your business, so what it carries deserves thought.
What was booked, when, where and what to do next. A message does not need to carry a customer’s whole history, and anything sensitive should not travel by email because it happened to be on the record.
Base does not build profiles from who opened what, does not sell or share what it sends and does not use booking data for advertising. Operational messages exist to make the booking work, and that is the whole purpose.
List the messages you would want to receive if you were the customer, and delete the rest. Set the reminder timing from what the customer has to do to be ready rather than from what is convenient to send. Configure your own email address so the message comes from you and a reply reaches you. Rewrite the default text in your own words, including the sentence about what to do if they need to change something, because that sentence prevents the most phone calls. Then send yourself one of each and read them on a phone.
These are operational messages about a specific booking, and only that.
There is no bulk sending, no audience building and no promotional automation. If you want to run marketing, use a tool designed for it and obtain the consent that requires.
A reply goes to you, not into a ticketing system. Base does not manage conversations, assign them or measure response times.
Mail can be filtered or refused by somebody else’s provider. Notifications reduce phone calls; they do not remove the need for a business to notice when something important has not been acknowledged.
No, Base does not send SMS. Messages go by email or Telegram: a booking confirmation email when a booking is confirmed, notices when it is changed or cancelled, and an appointment reminder email timed to what the customer must do to be ready — a day before an appointment or an hour before a class. You can send from your own address and change the wording.
The ones tied to an event: confirmation, change, cancellation and a reminder before the booking, plus internal messages to your team where your process needs them.
Yes. Configure your own mail and messages go out as your business, with replies reaching you. A fallback keeps them moving if that is not set up or is failing.
Yes, and you should. The defaults are a starting point; the confirmation is often the first written thing a customer gets from you.
No. There are no campaigns, no newsletters and no audiences. Every message follows something that happened to a booking.
They reduce the forgetfulness kind, which is most of them. The rule that decides what a no-show costs is still yours to write and apply.
Next step
Registration takes an email address. The operating model, services and resources are configured afterwards, in the console.