Whether you're managing appointments for a medical practice, salon, or retail store, enabling customers to schedule in advance allows you to optimize your time and resources, reduce wait times, and improve customer satisfaction.
This article will explore how to set up and configure your bookings to make the most of these capabilities.
How to configure your Bookings
Step 1: Enable Bookings
To start using bookings:
Navigate to Settings: Go to your Waitwhile dashboard and select Settings from the navigation menu.
Enable Bookings: Under the Bookings tab, toggle the option to activate bookings for your location.
Step 2: Edit Booking hours
Select Edit booking hours
Set your Booking hours. You can set certain days to closed and even create breaks during the day where your business will not be open (e.g. lunch).
Click Save to confirm the changes.
Note: You can also set special hours for holidays or events. These will override your regular hours when needed. To learn more visit our How to set detailed opening hours by date
Step 3: Customize Booking settings
Once bookings are enabled, you can fine-tune the General settings:
Set Availability: Define the appointment slot & spot options.
Slot Size: Choose the duration of each booking (e.g. 30 minutes).
If you offer SERVICES with varying durations, configure this to setting to match your shortest duration (e.g. 15 min if you offer 15, 30, and 45 minute appointment durations.)
Spots per Slot: Choose the number of spots available per time slot (e.g. 2 bookings every 30 minutes)
If your business offers varying spot quantities depending on available staff, days of the week, or even hours throughout the day, then you will want to make sure to utilize RESOURCES to determine the spots per slot. In this case, configure this setting to 1.
Allow staff to override availability: Check the box if you want your staff (users) to be able to override any booking availability if they create a booking through the staff experience (e.g. only 2 bookings are allowed at 11 am, but your staff can book a 3rd appointment on behalf of the customer)
Count every guest in a part as one spot each: Check the box if you allow one (1) customer to book on behalf of their entire party, but want to make sure each person in the party counts as a separate spot. (e.g. you have 10 spots available at 11am, but this could be 2 parties of 5, 10 parties of 1, or a similar combination)
You must ask customers for their Party size in the booking registration for this to function properly. Enable this question under Settings > Customer details
Resources have individual spots per time slot: Check this box if you wish to have your RESOURCES determine the number of available spots per time slot.
Scheduling Window: Determine the booking minimum and maximum notice
Min Notice: Configure how close to an appointment start time a customer can book.
Max Notice: Configure how far out a customer can book an appointment. Make sure to take into account staff scheduling if you are using RESOURCES for availability
Geofence: Only allow registrations within a certain radius of your location
Enable Geofence: Check this box to enable geofencing for your location
Coordinates: For more accurate geofencing, add latitude and longitude coordinates for your location
Max distance from location: configure the maximum distance the customer must be from your location in order to be allowed to register
Warning: Geofencing is only offered for registration and cannot be applied to check-in at this time.
Max bookings per customer
Limit the number of bookings a customer can make per time period.
Booking limit: Configure the quantity of bookings a customer can have at the same time. Use 0 if you do not wish to restrict and allow unlimited appointments.
Time period: Set the time period of the booking limit. (e.g. a customer can have a max of 2 bookings per month)
Other general configurations:
Booking time hold: Hold a booking for an amount of time while the customer completes their registration. When enabled, customers will be give 10 minutes to complete the booking before the
Allow flagged customers to book: Enable this setting if you wish to prohibit flagged customers from being able to make a booking.
To learn more about the FLAGGED TAG
Allow only existing customers to join: Enable this setting if you only want invited customers to be create a booking.
To learn more about the INVITES
Booking approval: Enable booking approval if you want your customers to request a booking and rely on your staff to approve the request before the booking is confirmed.
To learn more about BOOKING TYPES
Week start day: Set the day that the calendar week starts on based on your business schedules (e.g. Sunday is commonly the first day of the week in the United States)
Now that you have configured your Bookings, you are ready to customize your Customer Actions, giving customers the ability to take actions within Waitwhile as their visit approaches.
Have additional questions or need assistance? Reach out to us via chat or at support@waitwhile.com.