I am thrilled to announce a new feature we’ve been working on to help our customers grow their businesses: Appointments for Services and Bookable Resources.
Create a new appointment from the admin side, or request an appointment from the student side.
The appointments feature allows you to take appointments for any type of professional service such as a private yoga session, pilates session or massage, as well as appointments for physical resources such as a sauna, private meditation space, swim lane or any other physical resource.
Services
Services are “services which can be booked”. When creating a service, you outline which physical resources can be used to provide the service, which service providers can be used to provide the service, and how many of each are required. Most services require one service provider and one resource but not always. For example you can have “studio rental” which only requires a physical resource, or “private yoga over zoom” which would only require a service provider.
Create a service by outlining which service providers and physical resources (if any) are required to provide the service, and which passes can be used to pay for the service.
Bookable Resources
Before you put together your services, you’ll create all your bookable resources, which are made up of both human resources, which we refer to as service providers, and the physical resources you use to provide the services. This allows you to indicate which of your instructors/desk/admin users provide services, as well as which physical resources you use for your services. For each, you can quickly and easily dictate their availability.
Receiving Appointment Requests
Once you’ve put together your resource availability and the services that use those resources, you’re ready to take appointments. You can create an appointment quickly and easily from the admin side, or your students can request an appointment from the student side. For now, we’re following the “request model” where students request an appointment, and you confirm it. Shortly, we’ll allow you to auto-accept requests if you prefer.
Appointment request for a private yoga session with Maile.
Once you accept the appointment request, we create a “service event” which is essentially a special event flagged as an appointment. Like any other event, you’ll see the student registered for the event, It’ll show on your today page and internal calendar but will be hidden from your public calendar, and when the customer arrives for their appointment you simply check them in.
The end result of a booked appointment is a student registered for an event to which they will be checked in like any other event.
Initial Beta Launch
For our initial launch there are a few limitations. Appointments can be made by any logged in student. When students are making the request, we do not yet check for passes or go through the payment flow when a pass purchase is required, though that will be coming shortly.
When students are checked in we’ll alert you as to whether they have a valid pass or not just like any other special event.
How it works
We’ll be posting detailed “behind the scenes” of how this all works next week as it’s a new approach to appointment booking using the latest and greatest AI tools and new interfaces to which we’re all becoming accustomed. For now, we want to focus on the feature itself and the capabilities it provides our customers.
Join the Beta!
All of our customers are invited to join the beta period for the next couple weeks. Please schedule a short appointment for a one on one session where we’ll help get you set up!