Allow customers to contact you, submit requests, and book appointments through your website. Easily customize the time slots available to your customers using our Smart Scheduler and collect key information from them before scheduling. You can embed your booking portal in your website or send the link directly to your customers.
Enabling Booking Portal
To begin using Booking Portal, you'll first need to enable it. Start by clicking on Company Settings and selecting Features & Plugins. Navigate to Booking Portal and select Enable. Now you're ready to begin setting up your booking portal!
Setting Up Booking Portal
You will be prompted to customize your booking portal settings. Begin by selecting your booking contact method:
Contact Us Only: allows customers to fill out a simple contact form that is sent to you.
Contact Us and Book a Service: allows customers to select a specific service and submit a request without giving them the option to select a specific time. This is helpful if you want to review their request prior scheduling a time.
Contact Us and Book & Schedule a Service: allows customers to select a service and choose a specific time.
If you'd like to customize your Booking Portal URL, you can edit it here. Additionally, be sure to customize the welcome text, description, and notes as this will be displayed to your customers upon entering your booking portal.
After saving your changes, you will be presented with additional customization options.
Automatically Schedule a Job for Booking: this option controls whether or not jobs requested through the booking portal get automatically booked on your schedule. If left off, you will have to review requests and approve each one manually. If using our Smart Scheduler, we recommend turning this on.
Use a Designated Timezone: use this option if you want all times displayed in a specific timezone, regardless of the customer's location.
Custom Fields: allows you to gather specific information from your customers during the online booking process.
There are two scheduling options on the Booking Portal: General Availability and Service Specific Availability (Smart Scheduler).
General Availability: this option allows your business to set generic time slots for the days of the week as well as available time slots per hour. It does not take your existing schedule into account.
Smart Scheduler: define your availability for each individual service based on your team's availability, skills, days of the week, and more. We recommend this option as it is highly customizable and will take your team's schedule into account when displaying times to your customers on the portal.
Creating Services
The next step is to create services available for scheduling on the Booking Portal. The setup process for General Availability and the Smart Scheduler is similar, with the Smart Scheduler offering additional options. You can add multiple categories, each including their own services.
When creating a service, you can select how to display the pricing for the service in the booking portal. This can be changed under Booking Method. (Note: If you want to collect payment, you must have FieldPulse Payments enabled.)
No Pricing Information: The price is not visible to the customer.
Display Price - No Payment Taken: The price is visible to the customer.
Display Price - Require Deposit: The price is visible to the customer and requires a deposit to book. You can designate the deposit amount.
Display Price - Require Full Payment: The price is visible to the customer and requires payment in full to book.
Next, you can customize when the service can be booked using the Smart Scheduler. Each of the following options determines when the service is available to be booked. FieldPulse takes into account each employee's schedule and will only display times on the Booking Portal based on your configuration.
Team Members Needed: by default, we require at least one team member needed for a job. If you set 2 people required, FieldPulse will identify time slots that are available for different combinations of two of your employees.
Team Members: select specific team members who are eligible to work this service.
Time Slot Duration: this represents the amount of time that a service will block off on your users' calendars.
Time Slot Buffers: optionally add a required amount of time to be available on your employees' calendars before and after a job. This is helpful for taking into account drive time between multiple jobs.
Lead Time: this is the minimum amount of time required before a service can be booked. Adding a lead time ensures customers don't book services too soon when your team needs a bigger heads up.
Skills: utilize user tags to specify skills and other information to qualify specific users for working the service.
Booking Window: select specific hours on each day of the week for when the service is available.
Using the setup below, let's walk through an example. With this configuration, we're saying that the service needs 2 team members available, and it can Jared, Ben, Or Susan and these users must have either the Master Electrician or Apprentice tag. Additionally, the service requires at least a 1.5 hour time block and for my team member's to have at least 30 minutes free before and after the requested time. With a lead time of seven days, the earliest a customer can book a service is one week from now. This service cannot be booked on Saturday or Sunday.
Lastly, be sure to add labor or other necessary supplies through the Item box. This section works very similarly to adding items to an estimate, invoice, or Pricebook flat-rate job. Be sure to press Submit after creating your service.
Manage Requests
If you do not have Automatically Schedule a Job for Booking enabled, you will use the Requests tab to review customer submissions from your booking portal. Click Create New next to a request to create a customer and/or a job based on this request. The details entered by your customer will be auto-populated into the new customer record.
Embedding Booking Portal
To include the booking portal directly in your website, you are able to select Embed Iframe and click Copy to Clipboard. If you want to adjust the display settings, you can toggle on Customer Portal Iframe Snippet Manual Size Settings to adjust the pixels.
You'll now need to navigate to your website provider. This process will vary slightly based on each provider, but you should add a section to your website that allows HTML code. When prompted, paste the code you just copied to your clipboard and save your changes.
Customer Experience
Here, you can see the customer view for your Booking Portal. (Note: If you've added your logo in Company Settings, it will display here. We have entered the FieldPulse logo as an example.)
The time slots displayed here are based on the Smart Scheduler settings you customized for each service.
The categories displayed here are set under Company Settings>Booking Portal>Job Booking.
The services displayed here are set under Company Settings>Booking Portal>Job Booking. For example, these services have been listed under the Evaluation category shown above.
These two fields were created under Custom Fields which are edited from Company Settings>Booking Portal>Settings. The remaining fields are standard to FieldPulse's booking portal and will always appear.
If you have requested a deposit or full payment for the selected service, your customer will see a message like these before their appointment is confirmed:
If you have toggled on Send Appointment Confirmation Email to Customer, your customer will also receive an email confirmation message.
Video Tutorial
Have additional questions?
Contact us at support@fieldpulse.com or use the chat feature in the bottom right corner of your screen.