Bookings
There are many small and mid sized businesses whose major focus is to provide professional services to their Customers. Think of Doctors, Legal Consultants, Restaurants, Beauty Salons, Financial Services and many more. The common point with all is that there are resources, which could be specific consultants or they could be a Restaurant Table which people can book. In order to book the resource, a lot of effort is needed, be it multiple phone calls or emails. All that takes time.
We are pleased to launch a Web Service called Bookings, which will allow customers to schedule appointments. Using this Web Service, the following features are possible:
- Customers can schedule an appointment.
- The Service can send out a booking confirmation to the Customer.
- A reminder of the appointment can also be sent.
- An appointment can be rescheduled .
- An appointment made can update the Calendar of the specific person who is booked.
- The Calendar of the Customer can be updated.
- All bookings are updated on a central booking Calendar
- Business can create multiple booking pages and add new Staff
- The bookings page will be publicly available and could be displayed on the customer website via a link. This could also be available via the Facebook page of the business.
- A Mobile app for business Owner
Pre-requisites: Office 365 Business Premium subscription
To get started with the Booking app, the Business has to do the following:
- Enter your Business Information
- Set your Scheduling policies
- Define your Service Offerings
- Create your Staff List
- Set Employee working hours
- Schedule time offs
- Publish the Booking page
Lets look at some of the screen shots to get a better idea of the Solution.
Here you see a Legal Consulting Company LexGyan. They have listed 3 services on their page with costs. Below that you can see a drop down menu which will show the Staff names. Once a Customer selects a staff, the available time slots can then be seen based on the day you select in the Calendar. After selecting day and time slot, Customer fills up his email, phone number and a few more details. Next step is press the “Book” button
Immediately the Customer will get a confirmation message via email. This is systems generated.
The Customer also gets an option of rescheduling his appointment .
When the Customer does his Booking, there is a Central Calendar which gets updated. This gives one view to the Consultant of various appointments fixed with different resources. Going one step further , This Central Calendar also in turn updates the individual Calendar of the Staff making the whole experience quite seamless. Given below is the view of the Central Calendar.
So as we, Booking makes it absolutely convenient for Customers to schedule appointments with you. And you can manage the appointments with minimum fuss and maximum efficacy.