All Collections
New Online Booking
New Online Booking Settings
New Online Booking Settings

How to setup online booking?

Kasia avatar
Written by Kasia
Updated over a week ago

Our new, 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.

To set up new Online Booking, go to Settings and click on the Online Booking icon.

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.

Booking hours

The Booking hours 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.

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 customer 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.


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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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.

Did this answer your question?