Can customers book their own appointments?

Your clients can book appointments through GoReminders! When your clients are scheduling an appointment, they can select a location, preferred staff member, service, and desired appointment date/time depending on your settings in Settings > Booking.

Here are the available options on the Client Self-Booking page:

This switch turns your online booking form on or off. If you do not want customers to be able to book their own appointments, the “Booking Enabled” toggle button allows you to switch this option off and disable client self-scheduling. If “Booking Enabled” is turned on, your customers can instantly book or request an appointment using your Booking Form.

There are two booking styles that you can select from to customize your Booking form. They are Instant Book and Appointment Request.

If Instant Book is selected as your preferred Booking Style, the appointment will automatically appear on your GoReminders calendar under the Calendar tab in your account as soon as a client submits their preferred appointment. You’ll also receive an email or text notification for the appointment unless you disable notifications.

Instant-book Appointment Message(s)

The “Instant-book Appointment Message(s)” let’s you choose the Message Template or Message Sequence to use for appointments created by your customers with the Instant-Book option. The “Instant-book Appointment Message(s)” are the same templates originally set up in Settings > Reminders. 

The Message Template or Message Sequence you select will be sent out according to your general reminder schedule set under Settings > Reminders. If you select a Message Sequence for your Instant-book Appointment Message, the messages use the selected Message Sequence‘s schedule.

If Appointment Request is selected, then you can see and approve the client’s appointment request on the Booking tab of your GoReminders account.

You can also receive an email or text message with the requested appointment dates and times unless notifications for this are disabled.

Once approved, the appointment will appear on your GoReminders calendar found on the Calendar tab.

The “Booking Form Content” section is where you are able to add your business logo as well as create your landing page and confirmation page for the booking form. To add these options to your form, click the “Edit Content” button.

To add your Logo, just drag and drop it from your computer to the provided space. Or click to upload! The logo will appear on your Landing Page, which is the first page of the booking form. Your logo file can be a .jpg, .png, or .gif.

The Landing Page consists of the Page Title and Blurb fields. The text entered in these areas is visible to your clients on the booking form. Some suggestions to enter here are “Schedule Appointment” or “Book Your Appointment”. You can also enter some information like our example below:

The Confirmation Page is the final page aka the “Thank You” page of the booking form. This is the page your clients see after they have submitted their appointment information. It also has Page Title and Blurb areas so you can leave a note of gratitude or any additional information you would like your clients to know.

Once you have customized your Booking Form Content to your satisfaction, click the green Save button at the bottom of the pop-up window to save your changes.

You can set up the hours when you are available to book appointments in the “Open/Closed Hours” section. It helps control the available appointments on your calendar, so it’s not possible for clients to book an appointment when your business is closed for the day.

You can also set Location-specific hours under Settings > Locations.

In the “Form Options” section, there are several settings you can use to customize your booking form.

Required Contact Info allows you to require your clients to enter an email address, phone number, or both contact info for their appointments when they are filling out the Booking Form. 

The Minimum Scheduling Notice setting is a useful tool that allows your clients to book appointments with as little or as much notice as you’d like. If the setting is set to None, then clients can book appointments for immediate service. If you set the minimum scheduling notice for 1 day, then clients cannot book an appointment less than 24 hours/1 day from the preferred appointment time. The maximum scheduling notice time allowed in this setting is 1 week.

The Maximum Scheduling Notice setting limits how far in the future an appointment time can be requested. If you set the maximum scheduling notice to 4 weeks, then clients cannot book an appointment more than 4 weeks/1 month from the current date.
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Time selector interval determines the time intervals that appointments can be scheduled in your customer-facing booking form, starting from your Open times. This defaults to the same as the setting under Settings > Appointments, which controls your Appointment Form (the one under the New tab).

The Allow all appointments to overlap allows appointments to overlap on your GoReminders calendar if enabled. Clients will then be able to book an appointment at any time of the day within the hours of your Open/Closed Hours. However, if you don’t want appointments to overlap, to avoid having appointments booked at the same time, select any of the settings below:

Show appointment length refers to whether or not to display the length of an appointment on your booking form. In addition, each Service you offer your clients can have a custom appointment length. You can update the appointment length for your services in Settings > Services.

Form Fields includes the Show Staff Selector and Customer Custom Fields for your booking form. 

Show Staff Selector gives your clients the option to select a staff member for their appointment. To enable this feature, just mark the checkbox as shown in the image above. Staff members entered in Settings > Staff of your account will then appear on the Booking form.

Customer Custom Fields can also be added to your booking form. To create custom fields, first go to Settings > Customers in your account, and set up the extra fields for any additional information that is not currently requested on the Appointment form and Booking form. This feature is useful for additional client details such as Home Phone, DOB, or Company. Once your new custom fields are saved, go to back your Booking settings and mark the checkbox for “Show on form” to have your custom field displayed. You can also mark the checkbox “Make field required” if you want to make the custom field mandatory for your clients on the Booking form.
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​Notifications can be set up so we can notify you when an appointment is requested or booked on your Booking Form. When you share your Booking Link with a customer and they use it to request or book an appointment, you will get either an email or text. If you’d like to receive your booking notifications at more than one email address, keep in mind you’ll need to enter one email address per line. SMS/text notifications can only be sent to one mobile number. To set this up, go to the “Notifications” section and choose either “Email” or “SMS”.

If you don’t wish to receive notifications when an appointment is requested or booked on your Booking Form, go to the setting, “How should we notify you when an appointment is requested?” and select “No Notifications” in the drop-down menu.

If the notifications for text and email are disabled, you’ll want to make sure to regularly check the Booking tab in GoReminders to see if any appointment requests have come in and are pending approval. When you have a booking waiting to be approved, there will be a number badge on the Booking tab as shown below: