Are your patients not getting their appointment confirmation emails? There could be a few reasons for this! The first thing to do is check the communications log to see if there is any record of that message being sent. 

Then, the detective work will continue—the following could all be possible reasons that the message did not reach your patient.

We'll go through all of these reasons below!

Do you see a record of the email in your Communications log? 

Head to Communications, and you can see (and search through) a full list of all messages that have been sent from Cliniko:

A confirmation email will be defined as an Appointment Confirmation, and would say "Sent":

If you see it marked as sent, but the patient said they didn't receive it, please grab the communication ID number of that message and send it on over to our support team! We'll be able to assist further. 😊

However, if you don't see a record of a sent email, then check out these possible reasons—one of which is likely to be the reason no messages are being received!

If you do see a record of an outgoing message, like in the above example, it means it has been sent, but we don't know where it ended up—it could have landed in the patient's junk folder, or perhaps it bounced. 

If you see that it's been sent, but the patient is reporting it as not being received, please let us know. We'll need you to provide the communication ID number, which you can get if you click the date next to the message:

On the next page, the ID number will be found at the end of the URL, after where it says communications in the address bar:

Copy that number, and send it to our support team—we can assist from this point forward! To send it to us, simply click the "chat bubble" in the lower right-hand corner of this screen. 💬

Again, if you don't see a record of a sent email, it's likely that the culprit is one of the following: confirmation emails aren't enabled, the patient has a different confirmation email preference set up, or the patient has no email address.

If you don't see a record of the message as "Sent" in your Communications log, it's probably the case that your confirmation emails aren't enabled. This may be for just one or two appointment types, or it may be for all of them. Either way, you'll need to check it out!

First, take note of the appointment type that the patient is booked into. Remember what it is! 

Then, head to Settings, and Appointment types:

Below the "colour picker" on the appointment type page, check to see if Booking confirmation email says "None":

If it does indeed say "None", that would mean that this appointment type doesn't have a related confirmation email template, and even though this patient has an email address on file, no confirmation email will be sent.  

You'll have to select a template from the list (or add a new one). We'll walk you through the steps to get that set up right here! 👍 

It's possible that this patient has opted not to receive confirmation emails whatsoever. At some point, their individual preference may have been modified so that they don't get confirmation emails, even though the appointment type is set up to send them, and even though they have an email address on file.

To check this, select the patient in question. Check under Communication preferences. If it say "No" next to "Receives booking confirmation emails", like this:

That would explain why no email has gone out!

If this patient is meant to receive confirmation emails, you can change the setting by editing their details and ticking the box next to "Receive booking confirmation emails":

Save the settings, and this patient will now get those emails! 🤩

If all other settings look to be normal, the last thing to check is whether or not the patient has an email address on file. 

Select the patient in question. Under Contact information, is there an email address? If there is not, it'll look like this:

To add an email address, edit their details and add it into the "Email" field under Contact information:

Save, and then you'll see that email address show up at the top of their page:

All done! 🙌