Choosing staff when booking online
If you have multiple staff - we've added a new option to Timely so you can decide how staff are selected for online bookings.
To date, when a customer books online they can select a specific staff member, or select “no preference”. If they select “no preference” – the online booking calendar will display combined availability of all of your staff. When the booking is made the system will automatically select a staff member based on availability.
We had some feedback asking if we can remove this “no preference” option and require that the customer always selects the specific staff member for their appointment. And we listened. And now you can!
You will find the new setting under Settings > General settings > Online booking settings. When you turn this on, the customer will be required to select a specific staff member when they make an online booking:
Some tips:
- Think about your customers before you turn this option on. It is easier for them to make a booking when the “no preference” option is available. But if it suits your business better to force them to select a staff member, go right ahead and turn this new option on!
- To make the selection of a staff member easier for your customers – make sure you fill out the info for each of your staff members including their job title, bio and photo. You’ll find this under Settings > Staff > Details.
In future we are also looking at options for how a staff member is selected when the “no preference” option is used. How would you like to see the bookings assigned to staff members? Do you have a “pecking order”, or would you like it to be random, or evenly distributed amongst your team. Let us know!
An option to hide the choice of staff from the online booking process would be helpful for businesses where choice of staff has no real importance.
Thanks Ashley - this is certainly doable. But the appointment needs to have a staff member assigned to it - so how would you want the system to pick which staff member to assign the appointment to if there are multiple who provide the service? Or does it not really matter?
Very good. The app gets better and better every day.
Keep up the good work! :)
Would it be possible to display staffs full names both online and on email confirmations? Our industry asks full names instead of the more casual first name only.
Hi Leo - please send change requests to [email protected] or via the community site at http://help.gettimely.com (or use the feedback tab inside your timely account)
A useful functionality would be to have sets of skills assigned to workers so when a person books particular services are linked to skills so only available staff with the correct skills able to carry out the appointment are displayed and selectable. Where no preference is chosen, again only select from those which have the right skills.
An addition to this would be having an employees charge rate identified on the booking so costs for different grades of employees could be factored in i.e. a manager would charge more than a trainee etc
Scott.
It would be great if they could be evenly distributed among staff members.