Appointments

What it Does

  • Make Appointment bookings
  • Allow customers to create a booking from your website
  • Block out specific hours
  • Create appointments that will:
    • Show in the Calendar tab
    • Sync to your Google and Office 365 Calendars
    • Send appointment confirmation emails to customer/contacts

What it Doesn't Do

  • Make the bookings for you

Table of Contents

Appointments Training Video

Booking Appointments

We first recommend checking out the Business Hours feature. It's off by default, but allows you to set hours of operation, and add holidays you will be closed or unavailable for. Configuring this will automatically update any customer facing calendars for when you are closed. Super handy!

You can make a new appointment in a variety of ways.

  • At the top of a Customer Detail page, click New > Appointment. Or on the same screen farther down, to the right of the Appointments section, you can click New, which does the same thing.

     
  • Go to the Calendar tab (may need to click More > Calendar).

     
  • At the top of a Ticket, click New > Appointment. Or on the same screen farther down, to the right of the Appointments section, you can click New, which does the same thing.

     
  • At the top of the app, to the right of the Search all the things field, click + > New Appointment.

 

Once there, you can click the Toggle View (calendar) button in the top right to change the view to a horizontal view that doesn't have the appointment sidebar, and gives you options to only view appointments assigned to a specific User Account. If you switch to this view, in the upper right, click New Appointment.

Once you use one of these methods to create an appointment, it will either display a form similar to below, or you will fill out the form on the right side when on the Calendar in its default single calendar view. All fields marked with an * are required fields.

Select a ticket to schedule or re-schedule: Select an open ticket from the drop-down to assign this appointment to the chosen ticket.

  • Note: If you do not select one, you cannot attach the appointment to a ticket later.
  • This dropdown will not appear when you create an appointment from a customer profile, or a ticket (since it will be attached to the ticket you are viewing)

Customer name: Start to type and then select a customer's name. If you picked a ticket from the prior dropdown, it will disable this field since the ticket will have a customer attached. This field will not appear on the form to the right of the Calendar, nor when creating an appointment on a ticket or customer profile (since the customer is already known).

Subject/Summary: Give the appointment a title. This will be displayed on the calendar itself and sent to your technicians if they have a Notification Set that emails them when an appointment is created (more on this later).

Description: Any appointment details you want to preserve. When you create an appointment while on a specific ticket, it will auto populate this field with the ticket number and ticket title, but feel free to edit it.

Appointment type: Select the type of appointment this will be from this drop-down menu. This sets the type of appointment and drives which email is sent out to your customers, and auto-fills the Location field. Read more about defining appointment types.

Appointment Reminders Schedule: Lets you select from predefined appointment reminders so that you don't forget about the appointment.

Location: Fill in the location for the appointment and it will set the location for the appointment and populate the {{appointment_location}} tag in your appointment email templates.

All Day: Turn this on to indicate the appointment will last all day, or even several days. The next two fields will change to Start Date and End Date, where you can only select dates.

Start Time/End Time: Select the dates and times that the appointment will start and end, and it will add the appointment with those times to the calendar. It defaults to the current date and time, with an End Time of one hour.

Appointment Owner: Defaults to the currently logged in user. Selecting an account here will choose an owner for this appointment.

Additional Attendees: Select all of the technicians who will be attending this appointment, and it will add one appointment to each of their calendars.

Do not email this appointment invitation: Turn on this checkbox to not send an appointment email to the customer on the ticket.
You can modify the appointment email that is sent out by navigating to: More > Admin > PDF/Email Templates > Email Templates. Once there you'll see the 'Ticket Appointment Email' and 'Non-Ticket Appointment Email', which you can modify to adjust the email that is sent when this box is turned off.

Once you fill out the required details, click Create Appointment at the bottom to create the appointment.


Viewing Appointments

You can view your entire list of Appointments from the user menu.

That list looks like this:

They show up on the calendar like other items already do:

If you have sync enabled for your account, when your appointments are created they will show up on your Google Calendar as well.

Note: The calendar integration does provide a two-way sync (if enabled).

Full-Screen Calendar View

There is also an option to view the calendar with no sidebars, headers, or footers. This can be used on a larger public monitor that is set to full screen to display the calendar and the appointments to everyone in the office. You can access this view by adding "/calendar" to the end of your URL after you first click the Calendar tab.

For example, your URL would look like this: https://yourdomain.syncromsp.com/field_jobs/calendar
(where yourdomain is replaced with your subdomain)


Editing Appointment Email Templates

To edit the message that gets emailed to the customer, head to More > Admin > PDF/Email Templates > Email Templates, then find the following two Appointments emails:


Appointment Types

Appointment Types can be used to differentiate between, for example, Onsite, In-Shop, Phone Call, Web Meeting, etc. They will automatically select the appropriate address/note for the Location field in your calendar, and they can also trigger custom instructions to be sent to your customer.

We default to three types for all accounts, and you can change how they work completely.

The default way you use them is just select the Appointment type on a new appointment.

Editing Appointment Types

You can add and edit the appointment types in More > Admin > Appointment Types.

Once there, either click New Appointment Type, or click an existing type's name or its Edit button to view/edit it.

  • Name: The Appointment Type name.
  • Location type: Where the appointment will be held.
    • Customer's Address: Will auto fill the Location field on the appointment with the customer's address if you also selected a pre-existing ticket to attach.
    • Our Physical Address: Will auto fill the Location field on the appointment with your address set in your Account Profile.
    • Pre-Defined (hard coded here): When you select this, it pops up a Location hard code field below this dropdown. Whatever you type in that field will be auto filled into the Location field on the appointment.
    • Manual Entry (no location pre-populated): Will leave the Location field blank on the appointment.
  • Appointment reminders schedule: If you select one of the Appointment Reminder Schedules in the dropdown, it will pre-select that value in the same dropdown on a new appointment.
  • Appointment Buffer (minutes between appointments): The default time you want to set between appointments.
  • Automatically Add Ticket Charge: The main purpose of this field is to be able to automatically add trip charges to a ticket for on-site appointments, although you can add any inventory item you want.
    1. Whatever product you want to add needs to already exist in Products & Services. So if you want a trip charge, you will need to add it as a Labor item to Products & Services before being able to select it here.
    2. The appointment will need to be attached to a pre-existing ticket.
    3. Start typing and select an item from your inventory that will be added to the ticket. Although you can technically type and select any item in your inventory, it probably wouldn't make sense to select a physical item, like a computer monitor.
    4. As soon as you save the appointment, the charge will show in the Add/View Charges button in the ticket.
  • Appointment Instructions: Lets you provide detailed instructions based on the appointment type. For example, you could describe how and where to park or send meeting information for Zoom, Google Meet, etc. This text will be incorporated into the "Ticket Appointment Email" or "Non-Ticket Appointments Email" template wherever you insert the {{appointment_instructions}} tag.

Once you have finished creating or editing, click Save.


Appointment Reminders

You can build appointment reminders to send your customers that remind them of their upcoming appointments, both via email and SMS. See the second screenshot for all your options.

  1. Head to More > Admin > Appointment Reminder Schedules to start.
  2. On the next screen, you will see a list of active reminder schedules. Click the New Appointment Reminder Schedule button to create a new schedule, or click Edit next to an existing schedule.

     
  3. You will be presented with options around when reminders should be sent out.
  4. Name your reminder schedule.
  5. Turn on the checkboxes for sending email reminders the night before and/or the morning of if you want to do that. The 7:00 times are your local time.
  6. In addition to, or instead of, the above options for email, you can enter a custom number of hours before the appointment to send an email reminder.
  7. Likewise, you can optionally enter the number of hours before the appointment to send a reminder via SMS.
  8. If you want to override the Appointment Reminder Sms template text (click the global template link to see it), enter an SMS Reminder Message.
  9. When finished, click Save.

These schedules will be available to select on new appointments in the Appointment reminders schedule dropdown.

4 posts were split to a new topic: Adjust the default length for the appointment types

How do I change the content that appears in the notes / description section of an appointment?

Once created, the appointment shows Notes: and the text I entered for the description, but following that is Contact:, Details: and Customer Information: - how do I stop this extra info appearing?

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