A Monthly Look at the Confirmation Texts Your Customers Receive

Most firms write a confirmation text once, when they set up their booking system, and never read it again. Meanwhile the jobs change, staff change, and small gaps creep in. A short monthly check keeps the message doing its job: telling the customer what to expect so they turn up ready, and you don't spend the afternoon answering "are you still coming?"

Set up the check once

Put a recurring slot in the diary, the same day each month, and give it to one person. It doesn't need to be long. What matters is that it happens.

Keep a single note or document with three things in it: your current template, a list of the checks below, and a running log of changes you've made. That log stops you fixing the same problem twice.

Pull a few real texts

Don't review the template in the abstract. Pick a handful of confirmations that went out recently, covering different job types: a quick repair, a larger job, a first-time customer, a repeat one. Open them on a phone, because that's where customers read them.

Read each one as if you knew nothing but what's on the screen. Could you tell when someone is arriving, what for, where, and who to call?

The four-point checklist

Tick each text against these. They match the essentials in what a booking confirmation text should say.

• The slot. Does it give the day, the date and an arrival window, rather than "tomorrow morning"? If you work in windows, does it say so?
• The job as you understood it. Is the problem repeated in a line or two of plain words? This is the part that lets a customer correct a mistake before you load the van with the wrong parts.
• Access details. Full address with postcode, plus whatever affects getting in and working: whether someone will be home, parking, gate codes, whether the boiler, fuse board or stopcock can be reached, pets, key safes.
• Who to contact. Is there a number someone will answer, and does it say how to change or cancel? If the person who booked isn't the person turning up, is the engineer's first name there?

Mark each text pass or gap. You're looking for patterns, not one-off slips. If the same item is missing in most of them, the template is the problem, not the person typing.

Compare the texts with what actually happened

This is where the check earns its keep. Think back over the month and note any of the following:

• A customer phoned to ask when you were arriving.
• Nobody was home, or access was blocked.
• You turned up with the wrong parts because the job had been described badly.
• A customer was annoyed at the arrival time.
• Someone cancelled late with no warning.

For each one, ask which line of the confirmation should have prevented it. A "where are you?" call often points to a missing arrival window. A wasted visit often points to access details nobody confirmed. Wrong parts usually mean the job description was vague or never repeated back.

Fix the template, not the symptom

Make small changes and note them in your log. If parking keeps causing trouble, add a parking line to the template. If customers keep forgetting to clear the area under the sink, add a short prompt for that trade. You don't need every access question in every message; pick the ones that matter for that job type.

If different jobs need different prompts, keep a few short variants rather than one long text that tries to cover everything. Long messages get skimmed.

Check the small stuff

Before you finish, look at a few details that quietly go wrong:

• Placeholders still showing, such as a bracket where a name should be.
• An old phone number or a company name you no longer use.
• A tone that sounds cold or overly stiff. A friendly sign-off with a real first name works better.
• A call-out charge mentioned only if one was actually quoted on the phone. Don't add wording about money that doesn't match what the customer was told.

Close the loop

End the monthly check by sending a test confirmation to your own phone. Read it once more, then update the template and the log. If you've changed something significant, tell whoever takes bookings, so the new wording is used rather than a version someone saved months ago.

Do this regularly and the check becomes routine. The payoff is quieter phones, fewer wasted visits, and customers who know what's happening before you arrive.