Scheduled appointment email notification

Copper Contributor

I have assigned one employee from my Staff for one service that we are offering, but when a customer makes an appointment, only customer recives a email notification, but i want employee to also get a notification by email. I have figured out that only "Guest" staff get email notif., but if i set them as Viewer or Administrator, then only customer is getting that notif. Is there i can fix that so everybody get email notifications (employee and customers)?

29 Replies
Hi Aleksandar,
Thanks for your question!
Staff members are not set to get an email notification, they will get an event created automatically in their calendar.

A workaround for this is to set your staff members as Administrator and make sure the "Notify the business via email when a booking is created or changed" checkbox is ticked in the "Booking page". If you have selected to have different scheduling policies for each service, then you'll have to make sure that checkbox is ticked also in the "Services" tab.

Please, let me know if this helps.
Thanks!
I have already tried that before posting my question, a staff member is only receving a popup notification for a new appointment, but no email notification, so that staff member only knows there is a new appointment if she visits her office 365 profile. If there was an email notifications that staff member could also get notified by email app on a smartphone...

I am also having this issue. I was able to change who got the notification by going to business information> send customer replies, but this just changed who got the email notification in the first place.  The ability for the staff member to get an email notification when the appointment is created is pretty important.

 

thanks!

Rob

Hi Rob,

 

Your staff member should be getting a calendar invite in their personal email when a customer books an appointment.

 

That invite includes all the booking details, including customer name, email, and any other info or additional request the customer makes.

 

Could you please let me know what email service is registered for your staff member in the Staff tab?

 

Thanks!

 

Gabriel.

Hi Gabriel,

 

I'm looking at/testing Bookings for myself and several clients and am having this same issue - no email notifications of booking requests submitted online via my booking page, despite the appointment showing up in my Outlook calendar (Outlook for Mac) as well as the Bookings 365 calendar almost immediately.

 

This seems to be an ongoing issue and, to be completely frank, is a major flaw with the platform - we WOULD NEVER KNOW when an enquiry comes in. 

 

My Bookings page is: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/WilsonRobertsDesign@wilson-roberts.co.uk/bookings/YqvQAcU...

 

I'm the Admin (and current only employee in my new business) with david@wilson-roberts.co.uk being the primary account mailbox. I therefore see no reason why I'm not getting a notification?

 

...

 

I'VE JUST SUSSED THE PROBLEM - EMAILS GO STRAIGHT INTO TRASH!?! (see attached)

 

I had previously checked all Inbox folders and I just checked Trash/Deleted Items, out of sheer doubtful curiosity, and all my test emails are in there - immediately on submitting the form?!

 

I'm going to do a search on this and come back. Not good though!

 

...

 

Done a comprehensive search on Google, read several forums (Microsoft included) and this isn't a covered issue.

 

I've tried setting up rules in Outlook to move it from Trash to Inbox, yet the emails cannot be marked as "NOT JUNK" so rules aren't being applied.

 

Please sort this as a matter of extreme urgency as I will be doing a presentation to a client on Tuesday (9th Jan) and this flaw makes it pretty much useless.

 

I hope to hear from you, or one of the team, within 24 hours.

 

Regards

 

David.

Additional:

 

I've also just attempted to add the Bookings sending email address: Wilson-Roberts Design & Consultancy <WilsonRobertsDesign@wilson-roberts.co.uk> to "Block or Allow" in Outlook (Office 365 online) and it creates the error - screenshot attached.

Hi David,

 

Thanks for your feedback! Let's review a couple of things and see if that helps.

Bookings sends 3 confirmation emails (one for the customer, one for the staff member, and one for the business owner/admin), and one meeting invite (if you are an O365 customer then Outlook automatically accepts this meeting and adds it to your calendar, which means a "response" email is created, sent, and deleted - this is the email you see in your deleted folder. You'll notice that if you open that deleted email you will read "Accepted by XX on XYZ").

 

Regarding the confirmation email. You have to check 2 things, that both the service and the Booking page are ticked to send emails.

 

1. Go into "Booking page" on the left nav and make sure that "Email notifications" is ticked.

2. Go to "Services" and make sure that all your services have the box for "Online Scheduling options - Use the default scheduling policy" ticked - This means all your services will follow the policies from the "Booking page" (you can also set up specific policies per service).

 

Please, let me know if this helps.

Thanks!

Hi,

 

Thanks for the response.

 

As you can see from the screenshots, your advisories have all been completed from initial setup.

 

I'm no IT novice, have been working with Office 365 since launch, and I know the platform well. I checked all the "Help" articles for all the settings as I went along, as well as researched multiple forums, for anything I may have needed clarification on.

I'm pretty much confident that I have Bookings set up as per the guidelines and, according to info found on MS forums and Help Centres, I SHOULD be getting email notifications into my inbox - without them going straight to Junk.

 

Is't it a risky setting to have it so it automatically accepts the appointment? After all, the email that goes into my Junk folder has the three options as to whether to accept/edit/decline the enquiry?

 

Please advise next steps.

 

David.

Hi David,

 

I am checking with devs, since this seems like an unusual situation.

I'll get back to you as soon as we have a response.

 

Thanks!

Hi Gabriel,

Thanks again for getting back to me.

If you could let me know when/if you find out anything from the developers that would be great.
I'm also in the process of raising a support request with MS business support so will let you know if I should hear anything.

One thing that might be worth mentioning is the fact that I have a charity client who is on a WordPress website and their email notifications (sent and received by the same Office 365 mailbox in their account - staff@...) sent internally - to notify themselves when a donation is made - have suddenly started experiencing the exact same issue: emails are going straight into the Deleted/Trash folder?!
I'm wondering, with the new protocols introduced over the last year to prevent fraudulent emails, if there is somehow now an issue with Office 365 sending emails from a hosted platform using the same email address to send and receive?

Hopefully we'll get to the bottom of it soon?!?

Thanks again

David.

I agree. This is a pretty big flaw in Bookings.  I'm setting up bookings for our customers to schedule time to speak with our CEO.  I can understand why Bookings automatically accepts the appointment but he (our CEO) should still get a notification in his inbox that an appointment has been added to his calendar.  Please notify me when this changes.

 

Thank you.

This is so frustrating: You can only notify business, not the ONE WHO SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE MEETING! It doesn't matter if there's "automatically added" calendar events, but you don't get notified.

 

These are the features to get working: set the individual worker also to have confirmation e-mail automatically, there's no good reason not to.

Tweak office 365 and/or 2016 etc. NOT to delete automatic calendar events from inbox.

 

Really freaking simple. I will not spend my days aggressively waiting for a calendar event to pop up in my calendar. Why? If I have 2 hour puffer time, how the hell am I supposed to get ready if there's no notifications: i.e. I am starting one hour lunchbreak, and at the same time customer books an appointment. When I get back to my office, my superior wants to meet me for an 45 mins. Now then, in the wors scenario I have not checked my calendar and my client wants to meet 30 miles from my office. And he's expecting that, cause the puffer-time. Or we have phone-meeting coming up, and I don't have a clue about that.

 

No, this feature doesn't make my days easier. Frustrating. And annoying. Just make the individual staff member booked as the receiver in confirmation e-mail also.

 

Hello everyone,

 

Thank you for valuable feedback! Just wanted to let you know we are working on allowing Bookings to send a notification to the booked staff's email. Sadly, I don't have an exact timeline but hope it will rolling out in the next few months.

 

Please, submit all feature requests in our UserVoice channel so the dev team can see the asks directly from customers and prioritize them.

 

Thanks!

Why does it take MS dev a few months to figure out how to send an email?  This should take a few seconds... basically add one more email to the "send" 3 things that you mentioned above...

 

Or better yet, DO NOT have Outlook 365 automatically accept the invite. 

 

Again, both of these should take a MS Dev minutes to do.  Not months....

Unlike the problem described by previous people, I am receiving email confirmations for the company & employee, but for the client it is not always the case. On a test booking I did with my Hotmail email address, I did receive a confirmation. So did a friend of mine that tested a booking on my page, and he did it with his domain name email. But a booking from my Internet provider email (@videotron.ca) does not generate an email confirmation. I even checked my webmail version to see if I had anything in a spam folder of some sort and there is nothing. I cancelled those bookings from the company Bookings page and no email was sent to the "client" either.

 

Right now, it means that if I can't be sure the client will receive an email confirmation, I will have to manually send something?

 

Can we even be sure that email reminders will go through?

 

Thanks!

 

I confirm that staff receives: 

1- Email as a notification

2- Email as a meeting invite (will appear in the calendar as a grayed out item until it get approved)

I have tested this with hotmail & gmail account and it was working.

 

Confirmation.png

Interestingly, I am living in jordan; so when i am connected to local network the emails get blocked an i receive an error in office 365 message center

when i am connected to VPN (i.e. to england) it is working :) 

@jamil haddadin 

 

hello, what did you set for the staff to receive a confirmation? I have check the box (under staff) for him to receive the email but it doesnt work after a dummy booking through the system.

 

thanks for your help!

 

InkedCapture_LI.jpg

@Gabo 

 

I am having a slightly different issue.  both the customer and I get an e-mail confirmation for the booking but there is no additional information.  We have gone in and required four different additional pieces of information including a couple of custom pieces.  I have gone in and tested and indeed I cannot complete the booking without all of the required information.  However, when I get the booking, none of that information is there.

I get the person's name and a time...  No e-mail address, No, callback number, none of the required additional information.

I've stared at the settings multiple times to figure out what I'm missing and there just aren't that many settings for this feature.  I looked it up on the Microsoft support site and still nothing.

Not receiving that information creates a lot of extra work,  meaning that I have to go and look everything up...

E-mail

Phone 

Reason for Request  ( if possible or available )

Work Ticket Number if there is one associated with the booking

 

Any assistance that you can provide would be greatly appreciated.