Forum Discussion
Setting up discreet booking times
Hi Hoping someone could help
I am trying to find a way where customers can book appointments for a service rather than an individual at specific times of the day. This for us opening up certain activities under covid 19.
The slots would be 10 to 11 then 11:30 to 12:30, 13:00 to 14:00 and 1430: 1530.
The half hour break would be to allow for the cleaning of equipment.
I was planning on using shred mailboxes for the service.
I have tried doing this with business hours and "staff" hours as well but just cant seem to get it to work.
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks
- MitchS-SEBrass Contributor
AndyfF360- I've done something similar with webinars that will be posted at specific times.
There are actually a couple of things you can try to get your results. Both of these are based on the service times and business hours, not the staff hours.
v1) On the service details page, under the "Availability" section I setup custom hours for each service by first narrowing a specific date range and then specific time.
This example is for a webinar that was one hour long and presented on two different days during that date range. The 2:05p end time was because I've discovered that a 1-hour window for a 1-hour service is not reliable (I think the website doesn't think enough time is available in that window, so I add 5 minutes to the window).
For multiple times on the same day, use the "+" on the far right to add other times during the day.
v2) Use the "buffer" feature (on the same page) if you want to have multiple sessions during the day, not at a given time, but still need to automatically insert unbookable times prior to and/or after appointments for prep (e.g. cleaning up, reading over records, mental breaks, etc.).
With this option, the buffer times are automatically applied around a booked time and are only there if a booking is valid. If no booking exists (or one is canceled) this buffer time vanishes and the time slot is available again on the booking page the client sees. For you, maybe 30 minutes before would work to clean just prior to using a station.
As a side note, on this same page, you could add a reminder sent just to the staff member 30 minutes ahead of the appointment to ensure the station is clean.
Hope this helps!