Appointment Scheduler
Overview
The Appointment Scheduler is a new service that allows you to keep track of your clients and employees as well as setup appointments and schedules. It can also publish reports for clients and employees as well as send reminder emails when an appointment nears.
Logging In
Logging in is straightforward and accomplished by entering your user information on our website here and selecting the “Appointment Scheduler” link.
Upon logging in users will see their company info page.
Settings
The Settings tab features several selections for editing your account.
Business Info
This is the default page when users log in. By using the edit button the information on this page can be modified by users with the appropriate permissions.
Business Hours
The “Business Hours” page allows users to edit their business hours and when they are able to make appointments, days can also be marked as “Closed for Business”. Clicking on the pencil on the right side will allow users to edit these times.
Business Holidays
The “Business Holidays” page allows for establishing specific days of the year that a business is closed that over rides the normal business hours. This helps prevent the making of appointments on days no one will be in.
Personnel
The “Personnel” page allows an administrator to add employees to the account and control what aspects of the account they may edit. Creating people in this page will add new logins for the account. Permissions for the new person are set at creation and range from simply allowing the person to view the account and have appointments made for them all the way up to full administrator access that can create and delete personnel altogether.
Services
The “Services” section allows you to create different kinds of appointments with different lengths and the time that should be left open in between each appointment. The number of concurrent appointments for each person and whether or not it is a group / party type service can also be selected. Group appointments allow for assigning multiple clients to be assigned to an appointment while party allows for an appointment with multiple people with a single customer as the head of the party. All appointments MUST be assigned to a service and customer so it is a good idea to have a generic service / customer for one time situations / appointments with incomplete information. Each service must also have a set of personnel who are qualified for that type of appointment.
Email Templates
“Email Templates” is where the administrator can establish the pre-generated emails can be edited with variables concerning the appointment, customer, and service. The center field displays the selected email type and can be typed in. The buttons on the right add data fields to the email. PFN: Personnel First Name, PLN: Personnel Last Name, CFN: Customer First Name, CLN: Customer Last Name, AST: Appointment Start Time, AET: Appointment End Time, SDE: Service Description, SDU: Service Duration, CNO: Confirmation Number, PRO: Prompts
Prompts
The “Prompts” section allows you to control what questions need to be answered in order to setup and appointment. Prompts can be checked as either “Required” or not which will make answering the prompt mandatory. Our operators ask these questions when talking to your customers and setting up their appointments.
Once the questions are created our operators will see this screen when creating the appointment or customer with the prompts displayed to be answered on the right. The prompts highlighted in red are prompts that are required to complete the scheduling.
Miscellaneous
The “Miscellaneous” selection brings up a host of other options pertaining to the reminder emails including when to send the reminder email and which addresses to send it to.
Appointments
The appointments tab has to do with the setting up and reviewing appointments.
Make Appointments
Selecting the “Make Appointments” selection will guide you through setting up an appointment starting with choosing a service.
On Party and Standard appointments the screen will advance to the select personnel page allowing you to choose who the appointment will be assigned to. The any selection will assign it to the first available provider.
The next step will be the time select screen allowing for easy selection of when the appointment will begin. This is the second screen when assigning a group appointment.
Finally the customer select screen sorts customers by last name. You can also search customers by name and create new customers if needed
Upon finishing the appointment creation process the confirmation page will show the appointment details and allows finalization of the appointment or edit any erroneous information.
Every appointment is created with a unique confirmation number for book keeping purposes.
View Appointment
The “View Appointment” screen offers a variety of ways to view appointments such as by customer, by date, by provider, by confirmation number, and any combination of these elements. You can also select a group of dates by clicking and dragging the mouse over a group of consecutive dates or click on a date and hold shift and click on another date to choose a group of dates.
Customers
The “Customers” section allows for reviewing customer lists, searching though customer information and adding new customers.
Index
The customer index is a simple to use customer list that is sorted alphabetically simply click on a letter to display customers with last names of that letter.
Search
The search feature allows the customer list to be searched by a variety of parameters including first name, last name, email, city, state, and zip code.
Add New
Creating a customer is straightforward and holds a few features. “Email preference” switches between “Rich Text”, which allows links and formatting tags, and “Plain Text”, simply text and punctuation. The two check boxes at the bottom identify when to email the customers, on appointment confirmation and as a reminder.
Reports
The “Reports” tab allows access to three different reports that are automatically generated based on the dates and other parameters selected. The reports can also be exported to a number of different office programs including PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, Rich text documents, Web pages, XPSs, and directly to the printer for physical copies. Once generated the reports can also be searched and navigated on the site itself.
Appointments
The “Appointments” report shows all appointments in the selected timeframe as well as the modification history for each appointment, what service the appointment is for, the provider, and the confirmation number of the appointment.
Logs
The “Logs” report shows all administrative and appointment changes, when the changes were made, and who made them. The report can be sorted on the user that made the changes, the action taken by the user, and the portion of the scheduler the change affected.
Emails
The “Emails” report simply shows all the reminder confirmation and other emails sent out by the scheduler to its personnel and customers. The report shows the appointment confirmation number as well as the status of the email and the text of the email itself and when it was sent.
Refresh Data
The “Refresh Data” option forces your current session to reconnect to the server and get fresh data about the account. This is useful if multiple people or accounts are making changes this option will collect any changes made since login. This will also retrieve any appointments or customers created by our operators on the account since last login.
Troubleshooting
If you are having trouble accessing or using the appointment scheduler make sure that your browser is up-to-date. We recommend using Mozilla Firefox's latest release if you are having trouble, available here.
Contact Us
If you are still having difficulties after making sure you have updated software and cannot find the solution in this documentation you may call into our service with questions at 802-351-1000 or email us at tas@contactbeep.com.