Forum Discussion
Microsoft Bookings-Staff Member Availability Different Across Services
Agreed. This is a huge problem for us. We have a small team - just 4 people - but some of prefer to work in the office full-time while others work from home half the week. We have two different services to allow for this this - In-Office and Remote Service.
However, as Bookings currently is, a staff member cannot be assigned to a service for only certain days. It seems to be an 'all or nothing' approach.
'Customised Hours' will close off booking opportunities to those working every day if it is set to suit the work from home staff, but 'bookable when staff are free' opens up every single day regardless of whether that staff member will be present or not.
We're just discovering this as we (intended) to move more fully to online booking after an otherwise positive experience - but this is gonna scuttle the whole thing. Huge disappointment.
Siobhan_S this is where I am at as well. Almost the exact same scenario.
It's is poor customer experience, but it looks like the the work-around is to set up a service per person, then disable "allow customer to select staff" (so it looks a little less stupid). Unfortunately, this is a clunky. But, with only a few staff, it temporarily accomplished the goal without totally confusing customers or doing crazy work arounds with staff calendars to set unavailability.
gbickert Thanks for the suggestion. It never would have occurred to me.
You're right in that it's pretty clunky, but... well. Rock and a hard place, huh? 🙂Siobhan_S We will see how the public responds. In my case, I only have 3 people that accept appointments for this calendar. So, it isn't terrible. But, I'd sure like a proper solution so I can expand my use of Bookings for all kinds of purposes without hacky work-arounds.
My solution is to have each service type as separate calendars. As separate calendars, the business hours can be different for each staff member, across the different calendars/services.
Then the problem is that I have to share two links, one for each calendar/service. I don't want to have two separate links on the top page. So I think what I'll need to do is: on the top page, provide a link to a webpage which then shows the two link options; the two separate calendar/services.
Certainly not as pretty a result as Bookings provides when the two services are created within one calendar but... this is a solution that will have to work for me until a better solution is available.
