The customer booking portal allows customers to book their own work, saving time for office staff scheduling work, and increasing efficiency by highlighting slots which help to minimise overall travel time.
The portal searches through calendar availablility for the upcoming 30 days (starting the day after the date the customer interacts with the portal) across all engineers.
Prerequisites
In order to use the booking portal, you’ll need to:
- Be subscribed to a plan which includes our automatic scheduling functionality.
- Have set up shift patterns assigned to each engineer you wish to be available for customer bookings
- Have created job types and correctly configured these so they will show up on the booking portal (see this article for details).
- Have assigned skills (unless all engineers are able to do all types of work) to engineers and job types.
Configuration
There are a number of options available to help tailor the booking portal to the needs of your business, which are summarised below. If this is still confusing, please contact our support team with some information of how you’d like this to be configured for your account, and we’ll be able to offer advice and help you configure this.
This guide assumes you’re using the web interface of JobStaq, as a number of these configuration options aren’t yet supported on our app.
Booking portal
Now that job type specific details are configured, the final stage is to configure settings which apply to the booking portal as a whole.
General
- Enabled: whether customers can make a new booking without an invite link. If you include booking portal links on automatic reminder communications, these customers can still book work through the portal when this is disabled.
- Terms: formatted text which the customer must agree to in order to schedule the work. Use this to state any cancellation policies or any other important information.
Sharing options
There are several methods available for you to give your customers access to the booking portal.
Link / Hosted portal
This is the suggested option for most users.
A unique link is provided which takes you to the booking portal for your account. You can link this from your website, social media accounts etc, or send this directly to customers.
HTML embed
If you have a website which you’re able to edit the code for and you’d like to more closely integrate the booking portal into it, we provide a snippet of HTML code you can paste onto a page of your site. This will render the booking portal at the point inserted.
On the page you embed this snippet on, you can use the query string
parameter job_type_id to specify the default selected job
type from the dropdown on the first page of the portal. Without this
parameter, the job type field defaults to unselected.
(the hosted booking portal link makes use of this embed system to handle the booking portal, with some styling outside to show your company branding and company details)
Custom API integration
We have a booking portal API available if you’d like to develop a custom integration with our scheduling solution. Please reach out to support if you’d like more details on this.
Service region
You’re able to draw area(s) onto a map to specify which locations of properties are supported by the booking portal. By default, the allowed service region is unbounded, and only limited by travel time within shifts on each day. It’s therefore advised you reduce this to a smaller area.
Any overlapping areas will be treated as disallowed, allowing you to exclude areas within a larger selection (for example, in the image above, Manchester city centre wouldn’t be available for customer bookings).
If a customer tries to schedule work through the booking portal for an address outside of supported regions, they’ll get shown an error message informing them that the system was unable to automatically find any available slots, and will be shown your company email/phone details, so they can attempt to book manually (incase you are able to provide more flexiblity on travel distance for repeat customers / in quieter periods).
Time slots
To help optimise your overall schedule rather than the placement of a single event, the booking portal makes use of time slots to book events into, rather than fixed times.
The scheduling system requires the entire event fit within each time window, so you’ll need to ensure that there is at least one time window long enough to fit all job type default durations which are enabled on the booking portal.
You’re able to create overlapping time slots if desired.
The more time windows you create, the slower the suggestion system will be. Therefore, our suggested configuration is: - Morning slot - Afternoon slot - All day slot (if customers are willing to select this, this will help optimise future event placements on this date)
The slot name is what is shown to the customer, while the earliest start and latest end are for internal reference by the scheduling system, and are what the event time window fields will be set to once the event is booked.
Automatic reminder integration
The customer booking system was designed to integrate into automatic reminders for forms and certificates, to reduce the effort required to get repeated work booked into your schedule.
A variable ({{ form.booking_portal_url }}) is available
for form-level communication templates to dynamically insert a link to
the booking portal into the message. This link encodes details of the
customer and property, so they don’t have to re-enter this information,
and auto-selects the same job type as the previous job (if
available).
For example, you may create a SMS template similar to the following:
Hi {{ customer.first_name}},
Your {{ form.form.name }} is due for renewal soon. Please book a renewal of this work online at {{ form.booking_portal_url }} or phone us on {{ company.phone }} to schedule this work.
Once a customer completes a booking through the link, the form the reminder related to will automatically be marked as renewal completed, and no further automatic reminders will be sent.
Notifications
If enabled in your notification preferences, the JobStaq account creator will receive notifications whenever a new booking is made through the portal.
Calendar
When editing events through the calendar, a customer icon will be shown at the top right of the popup to indicate any events which were scheduled through the customer booking portal.
