Blog 3 min read

When the van is down, the waitlist fills the day

Cancellation reasons, auto-cancel of unconfirmed bookings, and a waitlist that settles its own offers, so a downed van's slots come back without phone tag.

Illustration of a mobile grooming van beside a stack of calendar cells, some dashed and empty, one filled, on a cream background

A mobile van loses its morning to a dead battery and the route loses every stop behind it. Each stop needs a cancellation, each customer needs a message that says why, and each open slot needs a new occupant. Slickerbook now covers all three steps, and the pieces went live the same day.

Say why

The cancel dialog asks for a reason before it confirms. There are five codes: customer request, unconfirmed, balance due, vehicle issue, other. The list is fixed so reports can count cancellations by cause, and the wording to customers stays consistent.

The customer’s cancellation text carries the reason. A template can place it where it belongs (“we didn’t receive a confirmation”), and a template that skips it gets one plain sentence appended, so nobody is left guessing why their appointment disappeared.

The cancels nobody has to remember

Two optional automations sit on top of that:

  • Auto-cancel unconfirmed bookings, off by default. When you turn it on, a booking still marked pending 24 hours before its start (the window is adjustable) gets cancelled with the “unconfirmed” reason, the customer is texted, and the slot goes to the waitlist. The setting lives in Settings → Reminders.
  • Van is down, on the Routes page. One confirmed action cancels every stop a van has left for the day with the vehicle-issue reason and sends each notice. Use it when the van is on a lift and the return date is a guess.

Nothing gets rescheduled by the machine. The waitlist offers and the customers’ replies fill the next open day.

The waitlist does the follow-through

Texting people about an open slot used to end at the send. The first person to hear about an opening had to claim it, and if it went to someone else, everyone else who was offered it heard nothing. Waitlist offers now settle on their own, checked every five minutes:

  • Booked by the person who was offered it: their entry retires.
  • Booked by someone else: the others who were offered that slot get a short text saying it was taken and they are still on the list.
  • The time passed with no booking: the offer clears.

Cancels made from the customer portal trigger the same follow-up texts as staff cancels. The Waitlist page shows what was offered and when (“Offered Sep 9, 2:00 PM”), so staff can see who heard what without opening a message log.

For the stops that still run

A down van leaves a partial route. Every mobile stop on the Workflow board has a Start drive button: it reads the phone’s position (or falls back to the previous stop, or the van’s home base, and tells you which), opens maps navigation, then offers to text the customer an arrival estimate. The message wording and the on/off switch live in Settings → Workflow.

The van still needs a mechanic. The rebooking needs no phone calls.

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