Config Tab 9: Appointment Types – Appointiv

Video for this step

What are appointment types?

Appointment Types are the different kinds of appointments that you offer for booking. Think of them like calendar appointment templates with the Appointment Type name in the Subject line of the calendar event. But this Appointment Type is turbo charged by knowing what people and resources need to be available in order for the appointment be booked.

You can enter lots of information here that will help your customers choose their appointments- the following will all appear on the online booking form:

Appointment Name (tip: Include the time in the name. Something like "Sales Call (30 min)" or similar)
Scheduled Elapsed Time of the appointment (must be in 15 min increments)
Description of the appointment
Price for the service (enter zero if it is free)

Normal Appointment vs Class Appointment

Normal Appointments: are available on what we call an "open schedule" meaning that whenever your Service Provider (and any resources) are available and scheduled to take appointments then a Normal Appointment can be booked. They're mostly one to one- and definitely only booked once in the booking form. We say mostly one to one because you can select to have multiple people but they all must be added and booked together.

So let's say you want to allow customers to book a Sales Demo appointment with you whenever there's a free slot in your calendar from Monday to Thursday- then you just set your schedule to that and your customers can book in anytime that a slot is free.

Class Appointments: are radically different. They're for 2 or more people and they're on what we call a "preset-time schedule" meaning that you as an admin or an Appointiv Salesforce user must add them into the Appointiv Calendar manually.

So let's say you want to have a Sales Demo appointment on Tuesday at 3pm this week and on Monday at 1pm and Tuesday at 2pm next week. Then you go in and manually add these appointments at those times. The appointment gets added to the Appointiv Calendar with no customers included. After that, you can add customers or customers can add themselves by choosing the appointment on the online booking form.

The reason for all of this is that we didn't want a customer to be able to just go in and schedule an appointment that is good for 20 people anytime there's a free slot in your Service Provider's schedule. So you get to decide when class appointments get created.

You can skip to 4:30 in the video above to go straight to the class appointments setup walkthrough.

Color

Click here to choose the color for this appointment type that will appear on the Appointiv Calendar page.

Advanced Setup

You can also customise the following:

Which fields appear on the webform for this appointment type
Which fields appear for internal Salesforce and Appointiv for this appointment type
Whether these fields update the Event record or the Customer record

This can get a bit tricky with fields coming from different Salesforce Objects and creating different field sets so feel free to reach out to our support team and let us talk it through with you.

Allow eligible Service Providers to overbook this appointment

Selecting this option will allow this type of appointment to be overbooked - as in double or triple or more booked at one time slot. The number times it can be overbooked is determined by the Service Provider's Overbooking Limit which is set on the Service Provider edit page in the People tab.

So if a doctor likes to schedule 4 patients every hour and then work through them as time allows, then make the overbooking limit 4, set their appointment start time to on the hour only and then let patients book four appointments on top of each other.

Available on online booking form:

If you choose the tick box for this option then the appointment will be visible on the web form. If not, then it can only be booked internally by someone with access to the Appointiv Calendar.

If it is available on the booking form - it will still only appear if the people and resources required to book the appointment are available. Dead End Prevention - Appointiv uses an algorithm that prevents your customers from clicking on any appointment that ends in a dead-end. In other words, if they see the appointment listed and click on it, at least one time is available for them to choose in the step where they select their preferred time.

Allow multiple clients

This option allows your client to add a "plus one" to their booking at the time of booking. So let's say you have a couples massage- they can add the second person to the booking and the second person will then get entered into the appointment in Salesforce and they will receive all the confirmations and reminder emails just as the original customer does.

Allow attachments to this appointment

Turning on this option means that there will be a "click here to add attachment" button on the booking form at the final step when the customer is filling in their personal details. The attachment gets added to the Event record in Salesforce.

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