Online Booking Settings
Setting up your employee permissions and booking windows prior to going live with the Online Booking feature will keep you in control of your schedule while ensuring your customer has a convenient and seamless experience.
Online Booking Windows: these are the available arrival time windows that your customer will be able to choose from when booking online.
Go to your Settings (gear icon) and click the "Online Booking" button. From the drop-down, click the "Booking Settings" button. You can configure your booking settings by choosing your preferred booking method, setting your booking hours, arrival window, and earliest availability.
In the section labeled Booking Settings:
Use the drop-down menus on the left side under TIME SLOTS to choose the start and stop times of your arrival windows.
Then use the check boxes on the right to choose which days of the week those time slots apply to.
Click BOOKING WINDOW to add another set of time slots.
Click the drop-down menus under Soonest Availability to pick how soon a customer can book a job.
Click SAVE to finalize your changes.
Select Available employees
In the "Available employees" section, you can select which employees are available for online booking. If you select an employee as available for booking here, it means that the online booking scheduler will take into consideration the availability and schedule of this employee, when presenting free time slots for the homeowner.
When a customer books online, that job will automatically be assigned/dispatched to the POC - it's up to you as a business to re-assign (dispatch) the appropriate employees to that job/estimate as soon as possible.
Note: If you do not have a POC selected, it will default to the founding admin of the account (the person who created the Housecall Pro account for your company).
POC (Point of Contact): this employee will receive a notification when a customer books online, and should be responsible for dispatching/assigning the job to an available employee ASAP.
Customers will not be able to book into an Online Booking window if all 'available to be booked online' employees are already scheduled for a job, estimate, or event during that time window.
This approach allows you, as the business, to control the experience for the customer:
For example: you could have 4 employees available to be booked online, but 1 of your employees may not be able to perform a certain type of work that is being requested - by not automatically assigning the job, the POC is able to ensure that your customer receives the best service by dispatching the job to the appropriate employee.
Your employee permission settings allow you to control how many appointments you would like to provide per booking window:
The number of employees you have available to 'be booked online' indicate how many opportunities a customer has to book a singular time slot.
Learn more about why online booking is right for your business.