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Colin365's avatar
Colin365
Brass Contributor
May 06, 2022

Updates in the confirmation emails

A few of our customers have noted this week that the confirmation emails that are sent when a booking is made have been updated. One new change is that the details from the "custom fields" have finally been added to the confirmation email which is a feature that would be really useful for our customers.

The problem is that this feature doesn't seem to work as expected. Our customers are receiving emails with the first options from each of the drop-down boxes instead of the options that they selected when making a booking. This leads to confusion for the customer about what exactly they have booked. This is obviously not a good user experience and since I can't find any documentation about this change I presume it is still in some kind of testing phase.

This problem doesn't affect the actual booking information which the customer still has access to if they push the button to rebook their appointment. But this has never been a very intuitive way for them to confirm these details which is why having it in the emails would be a great improvement to the program and the overall booking experience.

Testing the booking service from a user point-of-view confirmed this bug earlier today but the problem doesn't seem to be consistent and after testing a few different scenarios the section with the "Custom Fields" (which is called "Your details") has disappeared again from the confirmation emails. This new section was notably in English whereas the rest of the confirmation email was in the language chosen for the booking page in the settings - if that helps to debug this problem? (As there have been problems caused by the language settings previously)

I figured that my only solution at the moment was to add a note using the "Additional information for email confirmation" section to tell our customers that this is a bug and that it doesn't affect their booking.

We have used Microsoft Bookings to deal with nearly 2000 bookings in just 8 months and it has completely changed the way we organise things. But changes within Microsoft Bookings like this without any documentation to say what has changed and when it changed can cause critical problems for the users of this program.

Is there somewhere that the users of Microsoft Bookings can see a log of the changes being made so that we can know if a change is going to critically affect the way we are using this program? This isn't the first time this has happened either. For example the format for the confirmation emails seemed to completely change sometime in January 2022 without any documentation about this either and although the change was for the better it also meant that the instructions we were giving to our customers was completely wrong!

We are reliant on using Microsoft Bookings for the service that we provide and having the custom fields in the email confirmations would really be helpful for our customers, many of whom make multiple bookings with different answers for the "custom fields" so it would help them to keep track of their own bookings so we're eager to have this update and I'm sure many others are in a similar position. But if a new feature is being rolled out that still has bugs in it then I think that maybe we should have the the option to opt out - at least until the problems are fixed.

  • Colin365's avatar
    Colin365
    Brass Contributor

    Regarding the problem that my customers were experiencing in May 2022 where their choices in the custom fields were not showing up correctly in the confirmation emails; I didn't get any reply or see anybody else reporting the same problem. But I think this feature has been disabled for the last 4 months so that maybe explains things there.

    I still think that it is important to know exactly what has changed in the Bookings program and I still don't think this information is really available anywhere. My only option has been to regularly check the user experience for any new undocumented changes. At the end of August there was still no information about the custom fields in the confirmation emails that the customers receive. This means that sometime within the last week this feature must have been activated again and the problem must have been fixed now because the user now sees the correct choices in the confirmation emails! I've tested it on two different bookings calendars and it seems to work without any problems!

    For reference, I've included an image below from one of the tests I've done to show what the new user experience looks like in the confirmation emails. There is a new section called "Your details" and there the user will see your questions from your custom fields and whatever choices the user has made:

     

    An example of a confirmation email which confirms the user's choices in the custom fields

    I'm really glad this feature has finally been fixed and included in Bookings! I think it will really improve the experience for the users now that they can see what they selected when they made a booking.

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