Ask Our Appointments Product Managers and Designers Anything

[Tom]

Hello Sellers! On July 13th at 1pm PT / 4pm ET, we hosted a virtual office hours session within this thread where sellers had the opportunity to post questions and hear back from our Appointments team members! 

@rvoluck, @LoganSq, @winniecheng, and @pbarfield are product managers and designers on the Square Appointments team and, together, they took the lead in today's session. Having worked on a variety of features within Square Appointments and more than 6 years combined experience at Square, they addressed questions and make sure feedback went to the right decision makers. Learn more about Square Appointments.

A few example questions:

• How can I make sure I'm getting the most out of Square Appointments?
• What are the best strategies for using Square Appointments within my business type?
• There are so many different features available within Square Appointments, what are the top three things to keep in mind for someone who is getting started?

Note regarding account-specific questions: For your privacy and security, we are not able to address issues related to specific account status details in our public forums. If you need account assistance, please contact our Customer Success team and they'll be able to take a deeper dive.

[winniecheng]

Thank you for sharing all of this. This is all very helpful feedback for understanding how we can help you better communicate to customers how no-show protection works. One thing I do want to flag is that we’re currently working on rolling out a temporary $1 pre-authorization on no-show protection cards, which I talked about in my previous answer here.

@Jeanne100 , with that rollout, that will add explicit language that the customer will see a pending $1 charge that is a temporary hold that won’t be processed. It will also tell the customer that they will only be charged based on their cancellation policy.

@popsicleshop @MegganDickson - so to confirm, you are looking to require customers to put their Card on File when inputting a card for no-show protection? In other words, disabling the option for the customer to manually input a card instead?

[Umkee]

Hello 🙂

when will there be an option to block a problem client from booking?

and will there be an option for a waitlist for appointments?

these two things would help so much. 

[winniecheng]

Re: problem clients - Appreciate your feedback and sorry to hear that you are dealing with problem clients. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to permanently block customers from booking at the moment. Depending on how many bookings you normally get, one work-around that could potentially work would be to turn off auto-accept, so that you can accept/decline each booking that comes in.

Re: waitlist - check out my response here, and let me know if you have any further questions.

[Umkee]

Can we ask why the blocking option isn’t being added? I think people wanting this feature would appreciate an explanation why it’s not an option, and are wondering if it might be available in the future. Having to approve or decline each appointment individually adds so much work to an already busy workweek.

[dandelionFP]

Will there be a feature implemented to support appointments with multiple clients at the same time (classes)? Whether this be clients who book online and are complete strangers who end up in the same class, or groups of friends who book classes together, I think this feature would be utilized by many many people and would reduce the need for sellers to rely on external integrations.

[LowdownBallroom]

I could benefit from this as well!

[winniecheng]

Hi @dandelionFP , please see my response re: classes above. I appreciate you sharing additional color on the different types of classes you’re looking to support (strangers vs friends). Do let me know if you’d like to be part of a beta/early access program for this.

[Sunaura]

Hello, there: 

As a local cleaning service provider, we are urgently needing the appointment feature of scheduling multiple staffs within one appointment slot, so they can be dispatched at the same time. 

[winniecheng]

Thanks for your feedback. We currently allow you to book an appointment with multiple services and unique staff assigned to each, but unfortunately, the current functionality doesn’t allow you to book multiple staff per service. This is a very helpful use case and we’ll take this into consideration as we think about roadmap planning for next year.

[Blueangels7]

I am patiently waiting for a time line on appointment categories and appointment add ons. I know this has been a feature request literally since Square Appointments started. I know you guys have talked about it being on the horizon but I am wondering how far on the horizon are we thinking? I know SO MANY owners as well as clients are literally dying for these features. As well as wait lists, being able to set certain appointments to have down payments but not all, sending forms out automatically. So many other sites already offer these and I've been patiently waiting but after seeing how long these have been requests I am starting to lose hope.

[Kassi_]

Hey there, @Blueangels7 

There is an option to sort your Services in Categories, if you're interested. It will be an option to set up or add whenever the Service is created. If you'd like to add it to existing services, then you would add it under the "edit" section of the service. 

Also, you can add Variations to have those add-ons you're looking for. Check out the answer by Nika on this thread with some instructions on how to get those set up. 

Please let me know if you're looking for something a little different and I can circle back. 

Thank you for posting on this thread!

[MudFire_Deanna]

Is there a way to limit the total number of bookable slots. For example: if some instructors can teach 2, 3, or 4 people is there a way to limit the total number of people booking into a particular time regardless of if an instructor has availability? Like can I cap the total number of booked people - currently we are tracking bookings in a spreadsheet to add to the total and ask someone to remove their availability before it books.

[pbarfield]

Hi @MudFire_Deanna, thanks for asking about this. It sounds like a class booking feature would solve this need and it’s something that we’d love to tackle. Unfortunately, we’re currently blocked on delivering that feature by some internal platform improvements that we’re actively working on, so we can’t provide further elaboration on timeline.

But we’re glad that the community is continuing to ask about this, and we definitely want to continue to hear any feedback you have about classes. If you’re interested, we’d love to reach out to you to learn more about your specific needs around classes when we are able to tackle it. Let us know!

[MudFire_Deanna]

Yes I'd love to help any way I can @pbarfield 

[PetCentral]

We would like our customers to book multiple quantities of the same service back to back.

Example:

2x Service A
&

1x Service B

We own a grooming salon with two stylists and want customers to be able to book two dog grooming either together (2 different stylists) or same service (different dogs) back to back with the same stylist without going back out and starting a booking over again to do the two services back to back.

[mrsmckimmie]

Yes this! Even a way for me to edit service qnty. I realized last night what a pain it is to input multiple qnty of the same service when a client called to book 7 baths for his puppies. 

Do you mind if I ask how you gather pet info when clients book online? I'm currently using jotform in the confirmation email, but only 1/3 of my clients actually read the email, even if I tell them to be on the lookout.

[PetCentral]

It's a pain but if they haven't booked with us before we just have to call the clients to get the pet infomation. 

[pbarfield]

Also I can add that while adding a custom field for self-scheduling customers isn’t possible at the moment, this is an area we’re investigating currently. So be on the lookout for this in the near future!

[pbarfield]

Hi @PetCentral! It sounds like a group appointments feature would solve this for you, which would allow multiple customers (or dogs) to book services at the same time. Although we’ve heard feedback from other sellers for having multiple customers to get services together (e.g. mom & daughter pedi), we do not have immediate plans to add this feature. However, we’ll continue to assess our roadmap plans and if we do hear more interest for group appointments, we will consider building in the future.

A workaround we’ve seen sellers do is to create services for multiple customers (e.g. Dog Grooming - 2 Dogs) that’s longer than the normal service and priced accordingly, allowing customers to still book.

[madisonmud]

Any chance you will allow for multiple services at the same time for online appointments. Also will we be able to access invoices created for deposits through the calendar without having to look under invoices. If you click on the appt it doesnt link to the existing invoice when you try to close it out.

[winniecheng]

Re: multiple services at the same time - I’d love to hear more about what you’re looking to do here. Could you tell me a bit more about what types of services you’re booking and why they happen at the same time, instead of one after another?

Re: invoices - this isn’t currently on our roadmap but we’ll certainly take this feedback as we start annual planning for next year. Thanks for sharing!