Zipwhip vs GoReminders: Which Text Reminder Platform is Better at Appointment Management?

GoReminders helps you effortlessly text customers, manage appointments and more.

Text messaging platforms are a dime a dozen these days, helping businesses reach customers where their attention is—in other words, their phones. However, chances are that you don’t want to make idle chit-chat with your customers. Instead, you probably want to engage in more purposeful communication, and remind customers about upcoming appointments so they don’t become a no-show.

While Zipwhip and GoReminders are both equipped to help you send text reminders for appointments, Zipwhip’s features are more suited for one-off texts. This may suffice if your business needs to take the occasional booking or appointment. However, if appointments make up a significant portion of your business revenue, then you’re better off opting for GoReminders.

Our text messaging software effortlessly automates reminder messages and allows you to communicate with clients about their appointments with just a few clicks, saving countless hours as you no longer have to prepare and send appointment reminders yourself. In fact, we have a full suite of features tailored to helping businesses secure appointments, and that also  send reminder messages to get customers to show up. Here’s what we mean:

Appointment Creation Made Easy

We’ve made it easy to create appointments in the GoReminders platform: fill out a short appointment-booking form, and you’ll have a new appointment set up in 10 seconds or less.

With your appointments created, see them all in our built-in calendar. View your appointments by the day, week or month, or even filter them using fields such as location and service, to locate specific appointments without fuss. You can also sync GoReminders to popular calendar apps such as Google Calendar, iCal, Apple Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, to view GoReminders appointments from within your calendar app of choice.

In contrast, appointments aren’t the focus of the Zipwhip platform. As a result, you won’t find any convenient options to create appointments in it. In addition, when customers text you to make an appointment, you’ll have to note their appointments down elsewhere since there isn’t an option to view appointments in Zipwhip. As a whole, Zipwhip’s lack of appointment-related features could be a deal-breaker if you’re looking for an app for creating and managing appointments.

Take Appointment Requests 24/7

Set up Booking Requests in GoReminders to let customers self-book appointments anytime and anywhere.

While our standard appointment creation form works like a charm, customers love the convenience of self-booking appointments online. Using our handy Appointment Request feature, you can set up an online booking form for customers to do just that.

If you’ve enabled the Appointment Request option for your booking form, you can add the booking form link to your website or social media pages. Subsequently, watch as appointment requests start streaming in at any time of the day—even in the middle of the night, while your business is typically closed! Confirm these appointment requests and you’ll be all set.

Alternatively, if you’ve selected the Instant Book option, appointments will be automatically confirmed on your calendar when a customer fills out your booking form. Regardless of whether you’ve set your booking form to Appointment Request or Instant Book mode, however, time slots for confirmed appointments are removed from your booking form, so you don’t accidentally get an appointment overlap.

However, Zipwhip doesn’t have a similar booking form feature for customers to book appointments themselves. Instead, customers will have to manually text you, where you then reply with your availability to arrange the appointment.

Following that, you might have to go through a few rounds of texting until both of you find a suitable date and time. This can cause quite a bit of inconvenience—not just for you, but also your customer, who may give up on booking an appointment if this back-and-forth process is taking too long.

Fully Automated Client Reminders

People are busy, so you may have to nudge them with a reminder or two to get them to show up for their appointments. As a busy business owner, however, you probably don’t have the time to manually type and send reminders, especially if you have a large customer base. With GoReminders, you can automate the process of sending text reminders and email reminders, and free up time for focusing on your core business.

To set up automated reminders, you’ll compose your reminder messages, which in GoReminders are referred to as Reminder Templates. These reminder messages may include links that your customers may find useful, such as virtual meeting links or links to your website. Once your Reminder Template is set up, you can then schedule them according to your preferred Reminder Schedule.

Send your reminder messages as far ahead as 30 days before the appointment, or even as soon as one hour before its start time. You can also chain multiple reminder messages together, each with different content and following a different Reminder Schedule, using our Message Sequence feature to send up to three automated reminders for a single appointment.

When customers receive your text reminders, they can reply to the text to acknowledge receipt. Email reminders go one step further with two-way messaging, allowing you to communicate with your customers in a dedicated email thread.

As a texting service, Zipwhip doesn’t support email reminder functionality. More crucially, however, its automated text message feature can’t be used to send automated reminders for appointments. That’s because it works for sending automatic replies only during certain hours of the day, or in response to texts that contain certain keywords.

Finally, while message scheduling is available, you’d have to manually schedule each and every message in Zipwhip. All these limitations simply are neither suitable nor efficient for businesses that want to automate the busywork of sending appointment reminders.

Message All Your Customers in One Blast

Publicize one-off announcements with GoReminders’ Message Blasts feature.

Want to announce a limited-time discount? Or do you have a new store that’s opening soon? Spread the word using Message Blasts. This is our feature for mass-sending ad hoc text blasts and/or email blasts to one customer, a group of them or even all of them. There is no limit on the number of customers you can message at once, either!

Zipwhip’s similar mass-messaging feature is available only if you sign up for their most expensive plan. In addition, you’re restricted to sending text messages (this means no mass emails) and to only up to 100 contacts at a time.

Effective and Quality Customer Support

Although we’ve designed our appointment-booking software to be easy to use, you may have a question about it every now and then. In such situations, our friendly customer support team is eager to help! Click the in-chat support icon or reach out via our customer service line, and someone from our team will be right with you.

Customers love the quality of our support—just take it from Elizabeth Meigs of Best of Breed Dog Grooming, for example:

“GoReminders has been an excellent addition to my business! It has never caused me a problem, & clients never forget their appointments, thanks to GoReminders!? I can’t tell you how nice it is to work with a company with such customer service!You guys are GREAT! I’ll definitely be recommending GoReminders to everyone I know!“

In contrast, Zipwhip seems to have struggled with providing quality customer service over the last few years. Zipwhip customers have described the platform’s support as “all over the place”, “nonexistent” and even “horrible.”

Zipwhip vs GoReminders: The Verdict

When choosing between GoReminders and Zipwhip, the decision boils down to what you are looking for in your text messaging platform. Your priority may lie in investing in a platform that helps you book and manage appointments. After all, taking appointments is what will actually generate revenue for your business, instead of you fielding questions from customers. In this situation, GoReminders is the clear choice.

Our extensive range of features, from appointment creation and an online booking form, to automated SMS and email reminders and Message Blasts, and 2-Way SMS/Email Messaging, has been built with a singular focus: to help you book appointments, and then get customers to show up. GoReminders users have been able to reduce no-shows to as low as one or two per year, but you don’t have to take our word for it. Try GoReminders for yourself with full access, 14-day free trial. We look forward to partnering with your business!