Appointlet currently integrates with 1400+ third party applications, thanks to our friends over at Zapier. In a nutshell, Zapier acts as a bridge between your Appointlet bookings and other apps. They call each of these bridges a "zap" because they work at lightning speed. In this article we will go over the basics of how to set up an account and create your first zap.

To make this idea more concrete, we'll have to select an app to integrate with. Let's imagine that you want to send an SMS text message each time a booking was confirmed. The first thing you will need to do is visit the Zapier homepage and sign up for an account. Once you have finished setup, you will be directed to your account dashboard.

In this example, we'll be connecting with ClickSend a recommended SMS provider. Their solution has been tested and proven to work, so you can sign up for a free trial on their website if you want to follow along with this tutorial.

On the left side of the screen, you'll see a navigation bar where you can click on Create Zap to begin setting up your integration.

To connect with Appointlet, you will enter our Application into the first field to set up a trigger event. In this case, we'll use Attendee Scheduled as the trigger.

Press Continue and move on to the next step of the trigger event. Here you'll need connect an Appointlet account by clicking on the search box and selecting your account from the dropdown menu.

Click Continue to select an organization within your Appointlet account. Be sure to select the one that contains the Scheduling Page and Meeting Types you plan to use to send automated SMS notifications.

Once you've selected your organization, you can move on to the final step of the trigger setup. Here, you will test the trigger to ensure that Zapier is detecting your Appointlet information.

Now it's time to set up an Action event. This is how you will define what action will take place when ClickSend receives a trigger from Appointlet. To begin, type ClickSend SMS into the search box and select the application from the list.

Once you've selected ClickSend SMS as your app, you can choose what action will be triggered. In this scenario, we want to select Send SMS so a new notification message is generated and sent to an attendee when they schedule a meeting through your Appointlet booking page.

Just as we did when connecting Appointlet, the next step will prompt you to connect a ClickSend SMS account. Select your account from the dropdown list and then proceed to the Set Up Action step.

The Appointlet organization in this example uses our intake form to collect a name and phone number from the attendee. With this data, we're able to insert the attendee's number in the "To" field and address them by first name in the message. As you can see in this screenshot, no coding is required. Simply type out your message and click on the variables that you want to reference in your text message:

You'll notice that the date/time format in the Meeting Start variable is not very human-friendly. That being said, we recommend reformatting date/time data using the instructions outlined in this article. Please keep in mind that the Zapier Formatter step needs to be placed before the action step.

Once you've reformatted your date/time data, a new variable will appear in the dropdown menu with an orange Zapier icon. Use this in place of the default Meeting Start for a simplified display:

From here, Zapier will run some tests to ensure that your zaps are working. If you used a real phone number for your test, you should receive the text message immediately as shown here:

With this feature tested and working as expected, you can go ahead and turn the Zap on by clicking the toggle switch at the top right of the screen so that it turns green. When you do, all booking confirmations associated with the connected Appointlet organization will start triggering outbound SMS. The same is true if you set the trigger to listen for reminders, cancellations, and rescheduling.