We use Phorest regularly for our clinic marketing but find the current filtering system unnecessarily difficult to understand and use confidently. In particular, the combination of “Match All Filters / Match Any Filters”, followed by further AND conditions within individual filters, makes relatively simple audience selections feel quite complicated.

A good example is a campaign I'm currently creating.

I want to:

Send the email to our client database, but exclude anyone who already has a Hydrafacial appointment booked between now and 31st August.

This feels like it should be a very simple marketing segment to create, but I can't see an intuitive way to do it.

“Upcoming Visits” allows me to select a date range, but doesn't appear to let me specify the service booked. “Service History” allows me to specify a service, but relates to historic rather than upcoming appointments. Combining different filters using Match All/Match Any then becomes difficult to interpret with confidence.

I think the system could be considerably easier to use if campaign audiences were structured around two simple sections:

INCLUDE clients who:

[ + Add condition ]

EXCLUDE clients who:

[ + Add condition ]

For example:

INCLUDE: All marketing clients

EXCLUDE:

Upcoming appointment → Service = Hydrafacial → Between 18th–31st August

This would make the intended audience immediately understandable without requiring users to work out AND/OR logic.

Within each condition, a simple sentence-style filter builder could then be used, for example:

Clients who [have / have not / are booked for] [service / service category] [during date range]

or:

Clients whose last visit was [within / more than] [X months ago]

It would also be extremely helpful if Phorest displayed a plain-English summary before sending, for example:

“This campaign will be sent to 1,842 clients. It will exclude 16 clients who have a Hydrafacial appointment booked between 18th and 31st August.”

That would give users much more confidence that the filters have been configured correctly before a campaign is sent.

The current system is powerful, but I think simplifying the interface around who to include and who to exclude, rather than requiring users to interpret multiple layers of AND/OR logic, would make campaign targeting much easier and considerably reduce the risk of emails being sent to the wrong clients.