Live Q&A: Ask us anything about Square Appointments

[katieand]

On April 11th, we hosted a Live Q&A about Square Appointments. We recently announced we changed our pricing for the product, and made it free for Individuals. We had the Square Appointments Product Manager, Devon Meyer, here to answer any of your questions about the new price change or getting the most out of Square Appointments for your business!

@Devon has been part of the Square Appointments team for almost four years. He started as an engineer, and is now the Product lead. In that time, he’s interviewed more than 100 Appointments sellers, and knows how important it is to give service providers their time back so they can focus on providing a great client experience.

A couple example questions:

• What does the pricing change mean for individuals?
• How can I use Appointments to check out my customers when their service ends?
• How can I protect myself from no-shows?

Thanks in advance! Cheers!

[Devon]

@internetzorro this makes a lot of sense! I've heard the same request from a physical therapist-- he can pop between 3-4 clients at a time, so while it's not necessarily a 'class' with a set time and a number of 'spots', he was able to see multiple clients at a time. Seems like if we were able to support his usecase, we'd also be able to support yours!

As for pricing -- on March 27 we announced that our product no longer requires a monthly fee for individuals to use. if you have staff, your pricing depends on the number of staff that you have on Appointments. If you have, say, 5 service providers and need to add a phantom staff, this would increase your monthly fee. So if this applies to you, feel free to contact our Support team and we'll see if there's anything we can do for you.

[Fatbaby]

How can we set a specific event to only give specific dates! 

If i open more ore than one event at a time tons of people don’t read the details and they will click the correct event, then the wrong date. It’s a HUGE hassle for me to switch because it’s likely the date they wanted was sold out and that’s why they choose a different date! 

[Devon]

We don’t have a great way to support ‘event booking’ on Square Appointments today, @Fatbaby. Appointments is built such that each service provider can see one client at a time. The best way to achieve this would be to create multiple staff members, and set up their working hours to correspond to one event or another. Then, you can set up services to represent specific events. So long as the right staff and service are matched via the Staff Settings or Service Settings pages, this should get you where you want.

That said, this may incur additional fees since the price of Square Appointments depends on how many staff you set up. If this is an issue for you, you should contact our Customer Success team and we’ll see if there’s something we can do to help.

[danceprometheus]

Any way to make it location specific? Make it so customer can book service providers according to a certain area the provider works. We have to manually changed online bookings after they are booked for the appropriate provider right now.

[Devon]

You can sorta achieve this @danceprometheus! If you set up multiple locations in the Locations Settings page on Square Dashboard, you can then set specific service providers to be available at these locations. So if Erin works at East Side and Wesley works at West Side, you can have them show up as available at these different locations.

Then, on your website, you can send customers to different location booking pages. “Click here to book at East Side”, which will only show Erin’s availability. Even if the customer is entering their own address, you’ve at least set the expectation with your customer around which location the service provider is based in.

Hope this helps!

[dashingdigits]

Thank you for providing this.

Will this Q & A be recorded? Unfortunately I am unable to watch because I am booked for that time.

Will there be another one for a different time?

Question:

Will there be a feature to add a few staff on one ticket? My clients sometimes have 3 people working on them at the same time?

As of right now, we are only able to check out clients (who has had 3 services done by 3 Staff) through 1 Staff members's name, which we do in appointments. And in that way, once checked out, the appointment is combined and the appointment is blocking out that staffmembers calendar, it also shows credit for that one staff member only. 

So my question is how can we check out 1 client but still give credit to staffmembers and also not show on calendar as a long service since it combines?

Can there be a feature where on their ticket it shows what percentage they chose to tip?

Please also, is there a feature for booking out rooms? We have rooms in our salon or chairs and we all share them. It would be nice to have a feature just for rooms or chairs.

Thank you so very much.

[katieand]

Hi @dashingdigits - See my answer to @Preslie on the first page. There isn't a video component so no recording! 

[dashingdigits]

OK good to know.

Please reread my post. I edited my post. I am sorry you answered before I finished. 😣

[Devon]

Thank you for this feedback, @dashingdigits! Looks like there are a couple requests, so I’ll tackle each of them.

Currently Appointments only supports one staff member per appointment. That said, we’ve heard a lot of this type of feedback. Sometimes it’s in the form of “this service requires two service providers”. Other times, it’s more like “The client is coming in for 3 services, each done by a different service provider, but it’s all really one appointment”. Based on your feedback, I’m not sure which one applies to you. Could you give me a couple examples of how this actually works in your business? Either way, we’re very aware of this request. Though we don’t have plans to support it soon, it’s something we certainly want to allow for.

Managing the availability of shared resources, like a room or a chair, is also something we’ve heard requested quite a bit. It seems to be very important for spas, and many larger beauty businesses, but I can see it apply to anyone who takes appointments (repair workers needing to manage shared tools, photography studios needing to reserve the shoot space, etc.). We don’t have any plans to build this soon, but it’s something we’d like to support in the future.

Finally, I’m curious what you’d like to get by seeing the percentage the buyer chose to tip -- is this so you can see who is a good tipper and who isn’t? Or is there another reason that I’m not aware of.

This is great feedback, thank you!

[OhioTechWorks]

Can you add the ability to customize the location of each service? As-is either every service is at your business location, every service is at the customer's location, or every service has the choice of either when the customer books.

My business has a location but also offers in-home service - but only for certain services. I would like to be able to customize the location choice setting by each individual service.

[LifeRecovery]

We would like to be able to choose which days are available for different services. ie Mon, Tue, Fri phone/Skype appts only.  Wed & Thurs in person appts only. Thanks!

[Devon]

This makes a lot of sense, @LifeRecovery! Could you tell me a little bit more about your business and why you’ve set up your time in this way? I haven’t heard many folks ask for this specific capability, so I’m curious exactly what type of services you provide and why you prefer to have in-person appointments only on some days, and virtual appointments only on others.

As of right now, we don’t have any immediate plans to build this feature, but I appreciate the feedback and will note this in our list of feature requests. That said, I’m looking forward to your reply, because the more we understand this request, the easier it is for us to see how it’d apply to all kinds of different businesses!

[LifeRecovery]

Thanks for asking! We do counseling. We are at our "city" office (which is 1hr one way) 2 days a week and work from our home office the other days. Many of our clients are out of state or don't want to drive to the "city" so we offer phone or Skype appts the other days which we do from home office. So we don't want someone booking an in-person appt on a day when we aren't at the "city" office.

[Devon]

Thanks for the question @OhioTechWorks, and first-- hello from a fellow Ohioan! I was born and raised in Upper Arlington. Go bucks!

This is something I’ve heard once or twice, but I’d love to understand a bit more. What kinds of services do you offer, and which of those are in-home versus at your location? Is it always specific to the service? Is it always either “this service must be performed at the client’s location OR it must be performed here at our office”, or are both options available for some services?

Either way, this makes a lot of sense, and I’ll definitely be adding it to our backlog. We’ll need to understand the use case better, and understand how many other sellers would benefit from this, before we’d be able to slot it in to build.

Thank you!

[OhioTechWorks]

Thanks for the response @Devon. Born and raised in Massillon myself. Thinkning about moving south with all the snow we've been getting in "spring" though.

I do computer repair. I guess the main problem I have with it revolves around how I bill clients and my pricing structure. If they bring their computer to me, it's a flat-rate fee for a repair, but if they want in-home service that's charged hourly. So I have to enable "at the customer's location" as an option, but I don't want them to select a flat rate service (ie Virus Removal) for $50 and then have the option to put in their address.

I guess for now I'll either just have to call customer's who choose the wrong option by mistake or just use scheduling strictly for in-home service...

[Devon]

I don't blame you! I've lived in California for nearly 8 years now, and while I love getting my yearly dose of snowfall when I visit home for the holidays, it's great to be able to escape the cold and slush 🙂

Your usecase makes sense, and unfortunately that's not something easy for us to support. You could set the price of your service to be "Starting at $50", and in the description mention that it's $50 when brought to you, or $X per hour if done through in-home service.

Another option would be to create multiple services-- one for in-home services and one if the computer is brought to your office. You could also turn on "Business must accept or decline all appointment requests." from your business settings page. Then, when you're accepting or declining appointments, you can make sure the service they booked is the correct one, and if it isn't, you can change it before accepting it and even send the client a custom note to say "Hey, just FYI I changed your service to our in-home repair, which charges $X/hour. Please reach out if this is an issue". And they'll receive an email with this custom note.

I understand that neither of these options are quite perfect, but hopefully they help you out a bit here.

[anasiri7]

Will there be a replay? I am booked at that time. 

[puka]

Hey @anasiri7 - Check out @katieand's answer for more info on that. 🤙🏼

[Rasinko]

Weill there be an option to customize the booking website? To me there is not enough info on there.

[Devon]

Absolutely, @Rasinko! What kind of customization would you like to do? Is it just the look and feel? Or would you like to add more content? If so, what kind of content would you like to add?

[Rasinko]

The look: Give us more "blocks" by this i mean we can insert a text "block" with additional info. Picture "blocks" is desperatley needed, so we can add a picture to the service or good. rearange the layout, More personalization custom backgrounds, themes. i currently have a website with a booking button thatll direct them to my square booking site, will there ever be a tool to just make our own square website where everything is fully built in? 

The Feel: Deposits, i offer services for as low as $20 that dont require a deposit, but services $100 or more i require a 50% deposit, Will we get an option where we can set a depost over an amount? i know i can sort of do this now but only at a fixed rate. So i need an option that says and does anything over $100 requires a 50% deposit. Contracts or legal forms when booking an appointment? i would love to see this so when my clients book certain services before they actually confirm it they are greeted with a terms of service or contract from my business so they know whats to be expected from both parties. Cancellation policy, can we get an option to display this at time of booking instead of having to click on it to read it? One complaint i get from customers is they dont see the policy agreement cause they didnt click on it.