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Schedule an appointment for Call-Ins and Emails

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What do you do when someone calls or emails your practice wanting to set an appointment?

You will find two types of people in your community:

  1. One who calls your practice to ask questions.  These people generally want to feel confident by a person-to-person interaction.
  2. One who emails or texts your practice to ask questions. These people don’t need a personal connection but have questions. (Always remember due to HIPAA, you can’t answer most of their questions over email unless you use an encryption service).

How to save time

To save yourself on the time of manually looking at your calendar, taking the payment, and directing them to the forms, we simply suggest that you send them to your appointment page.  Explain to them that they should select the assessment, pay and fill out forms.  If they seem unable or unwilling to do this, we suggest that you visit your appointment page, and walk through it with them on the phone.

Schedule Appointments on your Dashboard

The following process for scheduling an appointment begins after you click the “+ New Appointment” button located at the top of the page or the “+” (plus icon) button in the bottom right corner of the page. Once you click on any of the buttons, a “New Appointment” dialog will appear, allowing you to choose all necessary information in order to create a new appointment.

“New Appointment” dialog is divided into two tabs:

  • “Schedule”: Use these fields that you must populate pane to create a new appointment. “Customer(s)”, “Service”, “Employee”, “Date” and “Time” are mandatory and you need to populate these fields to schedule a new appointment. There is no specific order in selecting “Customer(s)”, “Service” and “Employee”, but before you can choose the appointment date, you have to populate these three fields. After selecting the date, you will be able to select the time of the appointment:
    • “Customer(s)”: Here you need to select the customer(s) to whom the service will be provided. If the customer is not an existing customer, click the “Create New” button. The “New Customer” dialog will open and you’ll be prompted to add basic details, such as the customer’s first name, last name, email address. Creating a new customer is described in greater detail in chapter. The newly created customer will be added to the appointment. Each selected customer represents a single customer booking. After selecting the customer(s) you will be able to configure the number of persons for each customer booking. This can be useful when one customer wishes to book an appointment for several people. This is possible if services allow you to have more than one customer at the same time. It is also possible to change the booking status of each customer booking separately.
    • “Service”: Select the service that will be delivered to a customer(s). Once you select the service, it will narrow down to the employees and locations options. You will only be able to select employees that are assigned to provide the selected service and the locations where this service is offered.
    • “Employee”: Find and select the employee that you want to provide the appointment. Selecting an employee will narrow down to the service and location options, so you will only be able to select the services that the chosen employee provides and to the work location of the employee.
    • “Date”: Select an available appointment date from the date picker. Dates won’t be available until you choose the customer(s), service and employee. Once you have selected the appointment date, you will be offered available time slots in the “Time” drop-down.
    • “Time”: Choose the time of the appointment from the available time slots.
    • “Service Category”: While this field is not required it will make it easier for you to select the service by filtering the services of the chosen category.
    • “Notify the customer(s)”: When this option is checked, a notification that contains the summary information for the booked appointment will be sent after you save this appointment.
    • “Note (internal)”: Here you can write a quick note to pay attention to customer(s) particular needs. This note is internal and is not visible to the customer(s).

Editing a single appointment

It often happens, that you need to make changes to an existing appointment. Maybe the customer needs to reschedule their appointment, or maybe an employee is unexpectedly out of the office. To edit an existing appointment, simply click on the “Edit” button to the right of the appointment you want to change.

In the “Edit Appointment” dialog you have the option to reschedule the appointment, change customer booking status, change the employee, change the service… If you are changing the date, you may see that at the selected employee is not available for the newly selected date, or that the selected time slot is busy. If this occurs, simply select a different employee or choose a different time slot.

You can choose whether or not to send the customer(s) an email notification of the change, notification by checking/unchecking the “Notify the customer(s)” checkbox.

Once you’re finished, click the “Save” button in the dialog footer to save your changes.

To delete an appointment from the “Edit Appointment” dialog, simply click on the “Trash” icon button and click “Delete” to confirm.

You can also duplicate the appointment by clicking on the “Copy” icon button. It will open a “New Appointment” dialog with the same information as the duplicated appointment. You’ll have to pick an available date and available time slot for the new appointment. Duplicating an appointment might be helpful when you are in a meeting with a customer, and he/she wants a follow-up appointment for the same service and employee.

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