So You Need an Online Booking System

Recently I was approached by one of my good customers Living Wisdom Counselling & Seminars who wanted their clients to have the ability to view an online calendar of available counselling appointments and make appointments themselves in real time. The productivity benefits were obvious, less time on the phone discussing available appointments means more time available for more important things. All that is required by Living Wisdom is to logo in to their administration area and go to their Appointment Calendar, filter the “tentative” appointment requests to view just the new appointments that were requested that day and click on each link to display a form with clients contact details and a drop down list that will allow you to confirm their appointment. As soon as the appointment is confirmed, an email is automatically sent to the client. And that’s it. Simple eh? The finished results can be viewed here.

We discussed at length the requirements of this new application and decided it would need to be as simple as possible, so basically we narrowed it down into a two step process.

Client Appointment Request

It had to be easy for the client to make an appointment. The client simply has to browse the “available” appointment time slots (displayed in green on the calendar) and then click on the time they would like to make their appointment. Next they would be sent to the log on screen to log on to their account with Living Wisdom (or create an account if they didn’t have one). They would then be taken to the Client Appointment Request screen where all they needed to do is select the type of contact, be it face to face, phone or Skype and then click the confirm button. As soon as this is done an email is sent to Living Wisdom for their review.

Living Wisdom Appointment Confirmation

Living Wisdom Counselling & Seminars after receipt of the email from the client would then log on to their admin area and then either confirm the appointment in which case a confirmation email would be automatically sent to the client or contact the client to reschedule, if for some reason the time didn’t suit. The times when rescheduling would be necessary would be few and far between as Living Wisdom has the ability to mark time slots as “Not available” if they have some reason why they wont be available at that time.

48 hours prior to the appointment falling due, a reminder email would be automatically sent to the client informing them of their upcoming appointment.

Automatic Calendar Appointment Generation

The available time slots in the calendar are generated on the first day of each month, three months in advance. The default number of time slots can be edited in the admin area. Times can be added, deleted or edited. These will only come into effect when the next months time slots are generated.

Marking “Blocks” as “Not Available”

Living Wisdom also requested a way to mark blocks of dates as “not available” for times when they were on vacation or conducting seminars interstate or overseas. This is accomplished in the admin area by selecting a start date and an end date and then selecting either “Available” or “Not Available” from the drop down list. When this form is submitted all time slots that fall between the dates selected will be changed.

Conclusion

This Appointment Calendar application has many uses that will save both time and money for a wide variety of businesses like Doctors, Dentists, Counsellers, Bed & Breakfast, Motels even motor mechanics can benefit from the reduced administration time wasting, time that can be spent on more productive endeavors.

If you would like to explore the possibilities a little more, please drop me a line on our Contact Us page.