Using O365 for auto appointment reminder emails & texts

[Olusegun Odeniyi]

Dear Community,

I have a digital transformation use case which I'm thinking could potentially fulfil a common need and I'm wondering if anyone has implemented a solution using Office 365, possibly integrated with third parties. Here goes the use case.....

Situation

Small Garage is using physical job cards for vehicle servicing. Existing clients details are not captured either, apart from within QuickBooks for invoicing. The accounts clerk spends his days manually trawling through QuickBooks to determine which annual services are required and then sending a physical reminder letter.

Office 365 Upgrade

We have recently upgraded them to Office 365, and setup a simple MS form which they have just started to use to collect customers details through a tablet on the counter. As the have the business premium plan, they now have access to the Outlook Customer Manager (OCM) too.

Data captured via the tablet includes name, email, mobile, service date.

Automating annual service dates along with email and text reminders

Ideally, at a high level this garage app would be able to :-

1. Setup a recurring reminder on for the anniversary of their service after submitting their details via the form
2.  Capture any un subscriptions from the service, cancel the recurring reminder and notify garage personnel 
3.  Enable changes to the reminder schedule (e.g. individual decides to purchase a new car)
4. As the reminder isn't an appointment, book an actual appointment nearer the time (means the garage needs to have organised and published free slots). This could be phase 2
5.  Likely other considerations, but this is the high level story

How can o365 help?

I know many will be thinking 1) this is a bespoke app or 2) buy this as a service from a "reminders" supplier (load up name, email , mobile), yet I'm wondering how far we could go with o365. Consider other services which have a regular timeframe such as the dentist etc., particularly who are currently using a pure manual effort.

Using OCM

One simple idea would be to use OCM - create a new contact for each form entry, and use the captured date to create a recurring task. From  my brief examination of the flow templates, I'm not sure this would be supported.

Anyone done anything similar or have any ideas?

Nice little use case, which might inspire other creations. Let the power of this community loose.

Thanks in anticipation.

[#2]

Might be worth looking at Bookings - https://products.office.com/en-gb/business/scheduling-and-booking-app

[#3]

@Rob Ellis  Thanks Rob.

I have considered MS bookings, particularly for customers to book available sessions.

My current thinking towards a solution is to build a powerApp for client data entry via a tablet. Then make a JSON call via gov api to pull down MOT data, including annual MOT date. Then place a recurring task via Microsoft flow and set up another flow to trigger sending out reminders.

I'm going to enjoy trying to get this to work.