Our new and improved Online Booking tool enables you to provide exceptional service and win more jobs by giving homeowners a convenient way to automatically and reliably book their services online 24/7 from any device.
New Online Booking Onboarding
The onboarding flow allows you to set up the new online booking in just a couple of clicks.
To set up the new Online Booking, click into your Settings (gear icon) and then click on the Online Booking icon in the left sidebar menu.
Step 1: Set Up Services for Online Booking
Click once to select the cell in the table, and click on it the second time to edit data in the cell.
The names of services and prices are sourced from your existing price book. The table shows all the services that are enabled for online booking. All services get a 2h duration by default. If you'd like to change it, you can do it in this table, or later in the price book.
You can also decide if a given service should be booked in your Housecall App as a job or as an estimate, and you can assign employees plus add troubleshooting questions.
Assign service to employee: use this feature if only certain employees can perform this service type.
Troubleshooting questions: If the services require additional questions from your customers, add them here. Those questions will be displayed in the booking flow, once this service is selected by your customer.
Step 2: Booking Settings
In the next step, you can set up the booking rules, by defining booking hours, arrival window, and earliest availability.
Note: The arrival window you set here will become the default arrival window for your company.
Step 3: Preview Online Booking
You can preview how your new online booking will work once it's embedded on your website.
If you'd like to change something, use the "Back" button. If you are satisfied with the result click on the "Finish onboarding setup" button.
Step 4: Share Your Booking Page
The "Share your booking" step enables you to copy a code or a link that you can publish on your website, allowing your customers to access the online booking process.
Managing services for Online Booking
Service-level settings give you more control over the experience your customers will have and will help streamline how online bookings show up on the calendar and within Housecall Pro.
To enable, first, go to Price Book which is located in your navigation bar. Ensure you are within your Pricebook Services tab in the left side menu. Find and click on a particular service you want to enable or set up for online booking:
In the "Booking" section you'll find the following options:
Show the service in Online Booking - this toggle indicates which services are going to be visible to your customers in the online booking flow. If you want your customers to be able to book this service online, turn this toggle on.
Duration - this variable allows you to control the duration of that scheduled job or estimate. The information about the duration of service will not be visible to your customers.
Book this service as a Job or Estimate - using this feature, you can decide if a particular service, once booked via online booking, gets created in your schedule as a job or an estimate. You can choose one option, but not both.
Assign service to an employee - this feature allows you to connect services to employees or employee tags depending on who can perform a particular service, but will not be visible to your customer. You can add one or more employees or employee tags. (Employee tags can be managed in Settings > Employees.) Our online booking system will look only into available times in the employee(s) when suggesting availability to your customers. If you're not seeing an employee you wish to enable for online booking, go to Settings > Online booking > Available Employees and add them. It's important to know, regardless if the service is assigned to an employee or not, once booked it will be assigned to the employee that is marked as the Point of Contact.
Troubleshooting questions - you can add up to two questions per service that will be displayed to your customer only once they pick this particular service for booking. After picking this service in the online booking flow, your customers will see the questions you define. If you leave the fields blank, your customers will not see any additional questions.
Example how the "What brand is your AC?" troubleshooting question is displayed in the flow:
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Enable Available Services
The available services section lists all the services from your price book that are enabled for Online Booking. By using the pencil icon on the right-hand side, you can edit the settings for a particular service.
NOTE: editing the services here will also make these changes to your current price book.
In this section, you can also change the order of categories and services. The order that you set here is the order that your customers will see when booking.
If you haven't enabled any services for Online Booking yet, please go to the price book and select the service(s) that you'd like to enable. You can use the "Show this service in Online Booking" toggle to enable any service for Online Booking. You can find detailed instructions on how to edit services here.
Configure Your Booking Settings
You can configure your booking settings by choosing your preferred booking method, setting your booking hours, arrival window, and earliest availability.
Choose Your Booking Preferences
The Booking Preferences section lets you set your preferred booking method and manage your availability. You can configure your settings to offer flexible scheduling, set specific service start times, or you can choose manual booking.
Flexible Scheduling
Use this option if you want to enable your customers to pick the date and time of booking. Flexible scheduling allows customers to pick from a range of different time slots, set by the start time and end time of available booking hours.
The Booking Settings section allows you to define the business hours that you are available. Use checkboxes to select and deselect days on which you want to accept bookings. You can have one, or many time slots per day.
Example: If you define that on Tuesdays your booking hours are between 8am and 5pm, then the online booking will allow homeowners to schedule their bookings only between those hours.
If you'd like to have a break when you are not accepting bookings, you can use time slots to define it.
In the example below: The bookings are accepted between 9am and 2pm, and then between 3pm and 6pm. This means that between 2pm and 3pm, homeowners will not be able to book jobs using the online booking flow.
Set a specific start time
Defining fixed start times for your services will allow customers to make bookings during the exact date(s) and time(s) you make available. Use this configuration if you only want to offer booking times at specific, exact start times.
In the example below: The booking will be possible starting at 7 am or 1 pm. Note: the time option presented to your customer shows the arrival window. The length of the arrival window can be also set up in the Booking settings: Arrival window.
Manual booking
To avoid allowing customers to choose a date and time, select the "Manual" setting instead. This option requires customers to only pick the service, enter their contact information, and confirm the booking during checkout. It will generate an unscheduled job or estimate in your system that you can then use to contact the customer and handle scheduling.
Scheduling Type
Scheduling type setting lets you define how the Jobs and Estimates booked online will be scheduled.
Manual
When scheduling is set to Manual all the Jobs and Estimates booked online will be placed in the schedule of the employee marked as the Point of Contact. Those bookings will have to be dispatched manually to the right technician. This setting is optimal if you have a large number of technicians and complex scheduling rules.
Auto-scheduling
If you set the Scheduling to Auto-scheduling, the Jobs and Estimates booked online will be placed directly in your techs' schedules. To ensure that the right tech gets the right booking, you'll need to assign techs to the services. To learn how to do it, please read this section of this article.
Example:
This service is assigned to "John Technician" employee. Once this service is booked online, the online booking's availability engine will look only into John Technician's availability, and the Job created will be assigned to John Technician and placed in his schedule.
Set Your Arrival window
If you want to inform your customers that you will not arrive at an exact time e.g. at 10 am, but instead you will arrive in a given window of time e.g. 10 am to 12 am - use the Arrival window option.
The arrival window affects the booking options available for your customer in the booking flow. Please see the example below. The first image presents a 3 hours Arrival window used, in the second image show a case in which the Arrival window was turned off, by setting Arrival window to None.
 3 hours Arrival window |  Arrival window set to: None |
The Arrival window also affects what is displayed in the notification sent to your customers once they make a booking.
NOTE: editing the Arrival window here will also change the default arrival window for all Jobs and Estimates that you schedule, even outside online booking.
Set Your Earliest Availability
Earliest availability allows you to set how soon from today you want to allow for online bookings.
You can set it to as early as "Same day" booking, and other options are 1day, 2 days, 3 days and 1 week out.
Example: If you set your Earliest availability to "Same day", when a customer opens your booking page on the 5th of May, they will be able to book for 5th of May. If you set it up for 2 days, they will be able to book the earliest on the 7th of May.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Preview Your Online Booking
The preview section allows you to see exactly what your customers will see when clicking your online booking link.
In the "Preview" section click on the "Book online" button to open the homeowner flow. Everything that you have set up this far in the online booking will be reflected in this flow.
NOTE: this is the exact flow that will open on your actual website, therefore if you complete it and confirm the booking, a job will be created in your HCP account.
Share Your Booking Page
Have you set up your online booking? Great job! The last thing you need to do is to publish your online booking page to your customers.
In the "Share booking page" section you have two options:
You can copy an embed the code to be placed on your website. Simply copy this code and send it to your webmaster or the company that runs your website. This code will place a "Book online" button on your website, which will open the online booking flow on top of your website in a modal window.
If you want to link to your online booking page directly (ex: from your Facebook or Instagram page, or your email footnote), use the second button "Copy link". This is a link to the same online booking flow, but hosted on the HCP website's address.
Once you publish the online booking flow to your customers they will be able to access it to book jobs!
Add Tracking Attributes
Unlock deeper insights into the source of your Online Bookings by adding tracking attributes to your booking links. This allows you to see which marketing channels - social media profiles, emails, website, etc. - are generating bookings so you can optimize your marketing strategy accordingly. Once you use an online booking link with the attribute, the job or estimate resulting from that link will be tagged with the applicable tag.
Booking Redirect
The booking redirect feature allows you to redirect your customers to a custom link. Once the customer books successfully the booking flow will immediately redirect them to that link.
The redirect link
must use https protocol (transmits all data in encrypted form)
the link is the domain of your company's Website used in the Settings > Profile
This means that all pages within that domain e.g. https://www.poundshvac.com/thank-you will be accepted as a redirect link
The redirect feature also allows to redirect to the following domains:
google.com, facebook.com, fb.com, housecallpro.com instagram.com , pinterest.com , tiktok.com, wix.com, youtube.com
Notifications
Once your customer confirms a booking using the online booking tool, you will receive a text message notification on your phone, as well as an email.
Your customer will also get a text and email notification with confirmation of the appointment details.
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