*** NOTE: ALL INFORMATION IS ACCURATE AT DATE OF PUBLISHING ***
Now on to the real stuff with Microsoft Bookings, and understanding the experience for both your Customers and your Staff. When a customer books an appointment, it’s good to understand the process they will follow, and also what will then happen once that appointment comes through. Depending on the settings on the services and for staff members, notifications can be sent, so it’s good to know how that will work too.
For a Customer, they will navigate to the bookings page and see whatever services you have offered.
Clicking on the ‘i’ icon next to the service will bring up more details, including the description you have added for that specific service.
After selecting the service, customers can then select a date from the calendar. If a date with no appointments has been selected, they will see a message that there is no availability.
Once they have chosen their date, if your service allows it, the customer can then select the staff member they wish to have the appointment with.
Then they can pick the time from the time slots available for the selected date, and the selected staff member.
At the bottom of the bookings screen they will add their details. These fields are based on the fields set up for the service chosen.
Once all of the fields have been added, they will then agree to the customer data usage consent if you have set one up on your Bookings page.
The email notifications are now sent, depending on your settings within Microsoft Bookings. If you have the setting to send a meeting invite in addition to the confirmation email, you will receive something similar to this. If you have set this as an online meeting, you will see the meeting information for Teams within the body of the invite.
The confirmation email looks like this. Keep in mind that a booking.ics file will be attached which the customer can download and then add the appointment to their calendar that way. To me, the additional invite seems unnecessary. Some email clients, such as Google, will actually add this directly to the recipients calendar, or suggest it as an appointment. So, just keep this in mind if you do opt to send the additional invite. Notice that the notification email also includes the option to manage the booking which the customer can use.
If they click on Manage booking, they will see that they can reschedule the original booking, cancel it, or make a new booking.
If they reschedule it, the original answers provided will be displayed which they can modify, then they will update their booking as needed.
When the customer makes their booking, the bookings calendar associated email address will receive a notification email. This is based on the Email notifications settings area on the Service in Microsoft Bookings. The notification can be turned off if not required. The staff member booked will get the same email IF that setting is turned on from their Staff profile in Microsoft Bookings and they want to get notifications.
We can also see the booking in the Calendar area in Microsoft Bookings on the staff members calendar.
So now you know what experience your Customers and Staff will have when they use Microsoft Bookings. You can also watch the video on this here.
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Unfortunately, the youtube video about Ms Booking Series had not covered the topic about the way to monitor how many hours a customer already had made appointment. My business plans to give special care to customer who had use our 10 hours package services. My business also plan to allow only a same staff to be booked by a certain customer in the 10 hours package. Should a recurrent customer had to fill in name-email-phone every time he wants to make booking?
Hi Dharma. There is no way (at least not out of the box) to have a unique customer login for MS Bookings so that your customer doesn’t have to fill in their details when they want to make a booking. You could always make your suggestion here for more functionality: https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/314907-microsoft-bookings
Hi, in the ms documentation it references a 31 calendar limit for a service…if you had 50 advisors how would that work? Are the additional 19 just never utilised as it will only check the first 31 or will it only display the first 31 if all 50 has available time when the customer searches?
Hi Mark. Not sure, and I don’t have enough people to set this up to test with. I would suggest contacting Microsoft to see if they can provide an answer for this specific scenario.