SMS Appointment Reminder

Overview

Each morning a scheduled flow reads the day's appointments from a Dataverse table, texts each attendee a personalized same-day reminder via Twilio, and writes the Twilio message SID and a Sent status back to the appointment row. The today-window query also excludes rows already marked Sent, so re-runs are idempotent.

Why it matters: SMS reminders cut no-shows sharply and reach people who never open email. This is the simplest possible Twilio pattern - a great first build for the connector - wired end-to-end with real connector actions (no fixtures). Built and verified (Flow Checker 0/0), ships Off.

Use Case

Clinics, salons, advisors, or any appointment-based business that wants an automatic same-day text reminder to reduce no-shows, with a per-record log of which reminders were delivered (Twilio message SID).

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Connector	API name	Actions used
Twilio	shared_twilio	SendMessage
Microsoft Dataverse	shared_commondataserviceforapps	ListRecords UpdateRecord

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Opt-out (compliance)

Add a flowlibs_smsoptout Two Options column and append 'and flowlibs_smsoptout ne true' to the List Todays Appointments filter to skip opted-out attendees (TCPA / GDPR).

Two-way confirm

Add a second flow with a built-in Request trigger as the Twilio inbound webhook; mark the appointment confirmed when the attendee replies YES.

Lead time

Clone the flow with an evening Recurrence for day-ahead reminders, or parameterize the run hour with another env var.

Message channel

The same Twilio SendMessage op sends WhatsApp by prefixing both numbers with whatsapp: (sender from a WhatsApp number env var).

Time zone

The recurrence runs in Eastern Standard Time; change the trigger timeZone/hours to match your business.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

@concat('flowlibs_scheduledstart ge ', formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'yyyy-MM-dd'), 'T00:00:00Z and flowlibs_scheduledstart le ', formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'yyyy-MM-dd'), 'T23:59:59Z and flowlibs_reminderstatus ne ''Sent''')

@{replace(replace(replace(replace(variables('varTemplate'),'{name}',coalesce(items('Apply_To_Each_Appointment')?['flowlibs_attendeename'],'')),'{subject}',coalesce(items('Apply_To_Each_Appointment')?['flowlibs_name'],'')),'{time}',formatDateTime(items('Apply_To_Each_Appointment')?['flowlibs_scheduledstart'],'h:mm tt')),'{location}',coalesce(items('Apply_To_Each_Appointment')?['flowlibs_location'],''))}

{ flowlibs_reminderstatus: "Sent", flowlibs_messagesid: "@coalesce(body('Send_SMS')?['sid'],'')", flowlibs_remindersenton: "@utcNow()" }

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