Online bookings

Customers can ask for a visit through the booking form on your website, through their customer portal, or by ringing the phone agent. Every request lands in one list: Requests in the sidebar. Nothing is booked until someone in the office accepts it.

You need permission to edit jobs to accept or decline a request. Adding a new customer or site as part of accepting also needs permission to edit customers or sites.

Where requests come from

• Website form. The form on your site, set up under Admin, Online booking. If the person is not in your customer list, a lead is created so you can see who they are.
• Customer portal. A customer signed in to their portal picks one of their own sites, so the customer and site are already known.
• Phone agent. The agent records what the caller said: service, address, a number to call back and a preferred day. If the caller is not recognised, no customer is linked yet.

The list has three tabs: To review, Accepted and Declined. New requests also notify the office.

Reviewing a request

Click a name to open the request. The top shows what was asked for: contact details, address given, service, preferred date and time of day, and notes.

Below that are three parts you can check and change before anything is created.

Customer. The sheet tells you what it found:

• Matched existing customer Sam Maddison by email or by phone number. Phone numbers are compared after tidying, so 0412 345 678 and +61 412 345 678 count as the same.
• New customer. Fill in the name, mobile and email.

To change the match, click Use a different customer and search, or Add as a new customer. If the website form already made a lead for this person, accepting confirms that lead instead of adding a second record.

Site. If the customer already has a site with the same address, it is selected. Otherwise a new site is filled in from the address given. Check the street, suburb, state and postcode. A new site has no map pin; set it on the site record afterwards.

Job. The job type is guessed from the service asked for. If the sheet says it could not tell, check it. You can edit the summary and choose:

• Leave as a draft job. The job is created without a date. Find it with the other drafts and schedule it as usual. The date and time of day the customer asked for are kept on the job.
• Put on the schedule. Pick a date and a time of day (morning is 7am to noon, afternoon is noon to 5pm). The job goes onto the schedule as booked.

When the job is scheduled you can tick Send the customer a booking confirmation, by email, text or both. It uses your Booking confirmation template, which you can edit under Notifications.

Accepting

Click Accept and create job. The request moves to Accepted and shows the job number, which opens the job. Nothing is created twice: if two people accept the same request, or you click twice, the second attempt just shows the job that already exists.

Plugins hear about the new job like any other.

Declining

Click Decline, write a short reason and click Decline request. The reason is sent to the customer by email, text or both, using your Booking declined template. Untick Tell the customer if you do not want them to hear from you, for example for spam. The request keeps your reason.

A declined request cannot be accepted. If the customer still wants the visit, ask them to send a new request, or book the job yourself.

Things to know

• A request that has already become a job cannot be declined. Cancel the job instead.
• If a customer has no email or mobile, the message cannot go out. The sheet tells you which channels are available.
• Lead customers made by the website form that are never accepted stay in your customer list marked as leads.