Problem with the option to prevent customers managing their bookings
We have used Microsoft Bookings for several years to let our customers book services with us but we're noticing a trend that the customers tend to rebook their appointments an excessive amount of times which often leads to available spaces on group bookings being wasted. It also increases the admin time because each rebooking needs to be processed again so that the necessary preparations for the customer can be made. One idea we have to try and keep things under control would be to say that the customers should only book the service one time so that we can administer their bookings one time only and then if they miss their appointment time they could just "drop-in" because all the necessary preparations would have already been made for them. But I don't think this will change the behaviour with how the customers keep moving their bookings. What we really need is the option to prevent the customers from cancelling or rebooking their times themselves. I am aware that there is an option to "Let customers manage their appointments" but this feature seems to be broken! To disable the option you have to go into the calendar and select the group booking. In the pop-up window underneath the "Added Customers" you can disable the option to prevent the customers from managing their appointments. When you do this it takes away the reschedule and cancel buttons but it only works as a temporary measure because as soon as a new person books a place on the same group booking then the option becomes automatically enabled again! Then all the previous customers can also see the reschedule and cancel buttons again. It feels like this part of Microsoft Bookings is broken and unusable at the moment. The only way I could imagine it working at the moment is if a group booking runs out of free spaces and then nobody else would be able to book a place so if you manually disable the option at this point then would remain disabled for everybody. But until the appointment time runs out of spaces then people are just going to keep moving their bookings around. You could probably keep manually disabling the option when new bookings are made but this also adds to the admin time and it doesn't seem like a very practical workaround. Another idea we have had is to set a longer "minimum lead time" because this is another way to prevent people from cancelling and moving their bookings but it reduces the flexibility of when the services can be booked. But we're actually going to try this idea and see how it affects things along with changing the information to try and make the customers aware that they are being restricted to one booking. We hope that the option for the customers to manage their own bookings gets fixed soon. It also does not make much sense that it needs to be disabled per booking in the calendar? Shouldn't this be a feature that applies to every booking for a service instead? I've tried to disable the option on two different booking pages but the experience is just the same, the option just becomes automatically enabled again when a new booking is made.
Rescheduling with a different staff member removes the Teams meeting link
Hello, we have been experiencing the following issue: Service setting: "1:1", "Assign any of your selected staff for an appointment." A customer initially books a meeting with Staff A, and everything proceeds smoothly. However, if the customer reschedules to a time slot where Staff A is unavailable, resulting in Staff B being assigned, neither Staff B nor the customer receive a meeting link. Is anyone else experiencing the same issue? Is someone working on a fix, and how have you been dealing with it? Thank you
Bookings availability latency produces incorrect booking details
When a bookings page is first loaded, all days show up as available. If I quickly click on a time and then a day that should be unavailable and then "Next", then Bookings will produce an inconsistent result - the confirmation page will display the day I clicked, but the calendar invitation will be for the original day. In this example, when the page loads it selects Monday December 2 by default. If I click on a time slot (2:45 PM) and then on another day (Saturday December 7) and then "Next", it will proceed with the booking as normal for Saturday. However, the actual invitation is for Monday. Is this a known issue? I am doing this with my own private personal booking, using a link from the tile. This works when logged in as myself (i.e. opening another tab) and when proceeding as a guest (i.e. opening an InPrivate window).Validation Errors Not Being Shown To The User
Last week we had a few customers report to us that they had booked a time without receiving a confirmation email. There is no record of their booking in the system or export data so it is not clear for us what is happening. We think that it is unusual for several people to claim the same thing when every time that we tested the bookings system we couldn't see any problems. But if the customer believes that they have booked a time then where could the confusion be? We have experimented a little bit to try and understand what the problem could be and we've discovered that if the user does not select a time for the service or fill in all the required fields then the Bookings program just appears to reload the page instead of showing the validation errors on the screen. This is clearly a bug because the program used to show messages that guide the user on how to fill in the form correctly. For example if only one time slot is available for a day then it isn't totally clear that the customer needs to click on this time, but the validation error messages would normally highlight this kind of problem for the customer. But now when you click the "book" without selecting a time you would just see the same booking page again. The customer never sees any confirmation message so this might explain why the customers think that they have booked a time with us. But the worry for us now is that we cannot possibly know how many people this problem has affected but it is currently about 4% of the bookings. We also don't know when the validation messages stopped working either. We can't see that anybody else has reported this kind of problem but we've tried it on two separate Bookings sites and both sites have the same user experience at the moment. The user won't see any validation errors if they fill out the form incorrectly and because the page reloads without a confirmation message the customer might believe that their booking was successful. As a temporary measure we are trying to highlight through our own website that the user will receive a confirmation email if they have booked their time correctly and that missing details like selecting the time or missing one of the fields would result in their booking not being registered. There is also an error in the console saying that the page failed to load a resource which may or may not be connected to this problem. Hope that this problem gets fixed soon!
Shared Bookings Page incorrect available timeslots
My Shared Bookings page has started making the times available for things like 12:30 AM to 7:30AM, which is outside the times I have set as the business hours. I made no changes to the page or the services, this just started happening. I have even deleted and recreated a service to see if it would resolve the issue... it didn't. Any help would be most appreciated! Removed Update: The fix I tried did not work. Please help!Bug report: Bookings is generating 2 Outlook calendar entries for 1 appointment
Since around the 21st or 22nd August 2023, Microsoft Bookings has started 'duplicating' Outlook calendar entries whenever a booking is made. I have checked the backend of the Bookings system and nothing seems to have changed. My email is only attached to my Staff identity. When looking at the Bookings calendar online, there is only the one appointment per booking, as per normal.. When I look at my email, I only have one notification of an appointment being booked, as per normal. But when I look at my Outlook calendar, there are always two calendar entries for the same booking, side by side. The contents are identical. What's going on and is there anything I can do to fix this? (Real) double-bookings are something I need to watch out for and this automated duplication is making that harder. Update 06/09: Seems to have stopped occurring. Will update if this changes. Update 07/09/23: The duplicate bug has stopped, but the 'client's name not appearing in subject line' bug as reported by other users is now happening.
Select staff (Optional) can't be turned off
We offer different services, where we want to book our staff, but we do this manually. So we don't want our customers to choose who they talk to. This option is disabled in our service, but still shows in one of our services. If I turn it on in our other service, it shows. When I turn it off, it doesn't show again. With another service, I repeat the same steps, but the option still shows when customers can place a booking in our calender. Is this a bug or can this be fixed elsewhere?Time slots updating incorrectly when customers reschedule.
I am testing the reschedule option because some other Booking Page admins have reported that appointments are not retaining duration and buffer time when customers reschedule their appointment. I documented the steps taken below. At this time, my only workaround is to uncheck "allow customers to manage their appointment", but that feature does not seem to remove the "reschedule" button from the customer email, which isn't helpful. Below is my adventure in managing one single booking appointment. What I've found is that rescheduled meetings are moving the Buffer time and shortening the meetings unexpectedly. Test Service details: 1 hour duration +15 minute buffer before meeting "let customers manage appointments" and "send a meeting invite to the customer" are Unchecked: New booking created by customer. 8/17 11:45am: Staff Outlook calendar: 11:30-12:45 (correct) Staff Booking calendar: 11:45-12:45 (correct) Customer received confirmation email and .ics for 11:45-12:45 (correct) Customer clicks "reschedule" from email (shouldn't be available) Selects 3:15 time slot Confirmation page and email reflect 3:30 time slot (wrong) Customer and staff receive a Meeting Update email showing 3:30 - 4:15 (meeting shortened and buffer disappeared or moved) Staff Outlook calendar did not update at all (still shows 11:45-12:45) Staff Bookings calendar shows 3:30 - 4:15 Staff edits meeting from Booking calendar: Buffer time is not enabled, toggled that on and select 15 minutes before meeting Changed meeting time to 3:30 - 4:30 and clicked Update Booking" Booking calendar and staff confirmation email are now correctly showing the appointment from 3:30 - 4:30 Staff Outlook calendar shows buffer time again: 3:15 - 4:30 Customer received updated meeting notification showing 3:30 - 4:30. Conclusion: meetings cannot be managed by the customer.
Bookings - Time zone on booking page issue
Hello, I'm currently having an issue with one of our booking pages with the timezone. The booking page is for an event located in Europe but our customers are all around the world so by default the booking page was set up to show the time slots in the business timezone. However, we started having issues with some of our clients not being able to book an appointment and having the error: "Someone beat you to it. This time is no longer available. Please choose another one." However, the time slots are available in the calendar both for the event and the staff assigned to it. When unselecting the "Always show time slots in business timezone" option in the page setting the issue vanishes. With "Always show time slots in business timezone" unselected: Timeslots here are correct and the service is available With "Always show time slots in business timezone" selected: Timeslots here a shifted an hour and are incorrect, users will have an error if they try to book it. Despite both timezone being the same the timeslots are somehow shifted and the booking page is unusable. The easy fix is to unselect the "Always show [...]" but then customers will see the time slot in their local time zone and it can be confusing as it's a physical event we're booking here. Has anyone had this issue before? Is there a fix for it? Thanks,
