Forum Discussion
assign appointments to staff member after customer has booked (no reassignment of staff)
Dear MS Bookings community,
we are facing the following requirement in our business:
If the customer books an appointment (without selecting a specific staff member, this option is deactivated) the customer should not be directly assigned to an agent. What we would like to achieve is, that all open bookings are assigned by an admin to staff members afterwards. I do not mean reassignment of another staff member once customer has booked.
So in short, the steps are:
customer books an appointment and receives booking confirmation
business is notified via email about new booking
admin opens ms bookings and assign new appointment to staff. At this moment, agent assignment is done for the first time since all new bookings are "waiting in a pool" once assignment is processed by an admin.
customer does not receive a notification about agent assignment
By playing around in settings, an appointment was always assigned to a staff member at the moment of booking.
Any feedback on feasibility of this described requirement is highly appreciated.
Greetings from Hamburg, Germany.
Paul
2 Replies
davisjrMicrosoft
Paul_2901 for bookings made by customers, it's not possible to skip the staff assignment since this is required to make sure there is confirmed availability.
Given that you can always reassign staff, is there a specific reason you don' want the staff to be assigned on the initial booking? If its just to avoid the appointment landing in their calendar and then being moved out, you might be able to use some hacks/workarounds to resolve this. One option I can think of is to add dummy staff entries to receive the appointments and let the admin reassign to real staff members later. You can block out the availability of the real staff members so that they are never assigned appointments directly from the booking page.
davisjrwe have the same issue and want to achieve the same thing. My conclusion was to, as you say, create a dummy staff member to accept the meetings, give our booking administrator delegate access to the dummy mailbox so they receive the bookings and can assign them manually, although I am disappointed Microsoft do not have a better way to do this.
