Get Together + Square Appointments

Clients send a text. We schedule the rest.
Step 1: Client texts a scheduling request.
Step 2: Get Together will confirm key details.
Step 3: Get Together will book the appointment!
Step 4: Get Together will place the booking on both client and merchant calendars.

Inspiration

8 out of 10 consumers prefer to interact with businesses via text message, but the average consumer is still spending 50 hours a year on hold, oftentimes just to book a simple appointment! 😡

Because of this problem, 63% of consumers say they would be open to switching to businesses that allowed them to interact via text message. 🤔

Despite this, there is still no solution that allows consumers to book appointments automatically via text message…until now! 🤩

What it does

Get Together + Square Appointments is the fastest, easiest way to book an appointment! 🏎 💨

Get Together’s patent pending technology lets customers simply send a text message to businesses that use Square Appointments to instantly schedule services! 🪄

After a single-click registration, businesses simply share a text-to-book number for each location with their customers. The next time a customer wants to book an appointment, he or she simply sends a basic text message command like, “Find time for a haircut next week with Sally,” and Get Together’s patent pending scheduling algorithm will immediately interpret message context and offer available times! 💥

For those registered with Get Together, our technology will additionally triangulate calendar availability between the user and business to immediately find the best mutual times and place confirmed bookings directly on the user’s synced calendar(s)! 📅

How we built it

Get Together’s Square Appointments integration is built on top of our patent-pending scheduling algorithm which leverages a proprietary, natural language processing model to enable instant, broad-based, in-message scheduling. 🤓

During the Unboxed Hackathon, we connected the “scheduling brain” of Get Together directly to Square Appointments via the Bookings API and layered in an integration with Twilio in order to create a seamless text message scheduling experience for users. 🧠

We used the Square API Explorer to quickly identify all the necessary scopes, tested it in the Sandbox, and then created a true merchant account to ensure our app will function properly for our pilot clients. 💃 🕺🏽

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge was on the technical side. Our team hadn’t worked with any Square APIs before so just getting everything set up from the developer side with our team sandbox was step one. ✅

Learning the nuances of how Square merchants, location, team members, and services interact was a natural challenge, particularly when it came to navigating the merchant dashboard. Fortunately, the Square API explorer is AMAZING and we were able to learn everything we needed by just using that and reading through the developer docs…and maybe popping a question into the Square Slack workspace every once in a while... 😆

Our second challenge was on the business side ensuring that new clients can easily onboard and start using the service with their clients right away. To this end, we made sure that signing up just takes a single click for the business and a simple message to their customers! 🙌

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our product does in fact allow users to instantly book services with businesses using Square Appointments via text message! 🤗

We have been calling local businesses to perform hands-on pilots and already have several willing to try the Get Together + Square Appointments solution! 🤝

What we learned

Square Appointments + Bookings API is exactly what we’ve been looking for to start allowing Get Together users to schedule instantly with businesses via text! This has been one of the top requests from our users for the last several months and now, with Square Appointments, we are making it happen! 👏

What's next for Get Together

While we’re proud of what we were able to accomplish during the hackathon, we are definitely not done working on our Square App! 💪

On the product side, we plan to ship a more visually appealing and complete admin page for businesses so that they can track the ROI of using our text message-based service! 📦

On the sales and consumer side, we already have local pilot businesses ready to get started! Additionally, because Get Together’s group scheduling service already has a base of social users, we can use their input as a distributed salesforce to recommend additional businesses for us to onboard! Let’s goooo! 🔥