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Nudge Clients When They Haven’t Scheduled an Appointment

Engagements are CA’s way of allowing you to track a clients progression through an allocation of appointments (e.g. 10 hours or 12 sessions), with the option to add recurring invoicing and timely notifications along the way.

When we first launched Engagements, Engagement notifications only came in one flavor: coaches could schedule a notification based on progress through the Engagement allocation (e.g. “Hi Morgan, you have 3 appointments left. Here are the ones you’ve had so far…”).  Later on, and by request, we added the option for time-based notification (“Hi Morgan, you’re now 30 days into your Engagement…”).

Based on the feedback you’ve given us we’ve now added a third flavor of Engagement notification: Schedule Nudge.

A Schedule Nudge will notify you or your client when it’s been a certain number of days since the last appointment, specifically when there’s still nothing else scheduled on the calendar. Setting these serves to alert you (or your client) when things are ostensibly stalled out in your coaching relationship and prompt scheduling of the next session, and you can use this to keep the momentum in the coaching relationship going. The automated nature of these nudges means the system can now step in so you don’t have to.

Let’s take a look.

Set Up a Nudge

From Settings >> Engagements >> Engagement Templates, open up a template and head to its Notifications tab.

Notice the spiffy new + Schedule Nudge button.

CoachAccountable Engagement Schedule Nudge

Three flavors, mix and match as you like!

When you you add a Schedule Nudge, you’ll see the typical option to choose between notifying coach or client.  Then, simply enter after how many days since the most recent appointment you’d like the nudge to go out:

When you hover over the word “appointment” you’ll get a bit more detail on what this means: these notifications go out ONLY when there’s some allocation remaining in the Engagement, AND there are no future appointments scheduled.

You can set several of these.  We recommend one for your clients, and then one for you as coach 1 to 3 days later, so that you’ll have a heads up with which to intervene if your client STILL hasn’t scheduled an appointment in response to the nudge.

How far out should you set these?  We recommend whatever would generally ensure the typical cadence of your sessions.  If you’re one to have your sessions every month, setting a nudge for your clients 21 days after the last one is apt to work well to keep that cadence (i.e. they’d have another week or so to get on your calendar).  Or you might, as a general rule, encourage them to keep generally on top of having their next session with you scheduled, meaning 1 or 2 days out could be more fitting.

Whichever way you do it, the system will always re-compute when the next nudge should go out per the ones you set.  When an upcoming appointment is scheduled, moved or cancelled, the send date for the nudges will recalculate accordingly.  Unlike the other two flavors of notifications, these nudges will reset themselves (and potentially be sent multiple times, as needed) over the life of the Engagement.  By bringing up the Engagement summary you can always review when these nudges are slated to send, based on what is (and isn’t!) scheduled on the calendar.

New Message Template

This sort of notification entails some verbiage that is distinct from the other Engagement notifications (which are more of a progress summary).  Accordingly, you’ll find a new message template ripe for customization. Go to Settings >> System >> Message Templates, and select “Engagement Schedule Nudge Notification.” It’s a simple one, to be sure, but includes a magic tag that is itself a schedule link that puts your clients one click away from scheduling with you. You can even change the text of the [scheduleLink] tag if desired (we’ve set it to “Click here to schedule.”, but feel free to get creative).

Engagement Nudge Email Template

Alternate text for that schedule link you might consider is “Get crackin’ already, I’m dyin’ to talk and hear what’s new!” According to our research here at CA Labs, personality-laden copy seems to be received even better than more standard, “professional” variants. :)

And that’s it! Here’s to continually improving CoachAccountable with your help; we hope you’ll enjoy this additional way to keep your clients’ coaching momentum going.



2 Comments

  1. Veronica

    Will this update current engagements to receive the nudges?

    October 15, 2020 @ 3:54 pm

  2. Morgan

    Hi Veronica, updating your templates won’t update any current Engagements. Thus, you’ll want to add nudges manually to any in-progress Engagements.

    October 16, 2020 @ 9:49 am