Time slots - restricting times offered to clients to give control to salon owner
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Colm O'Neill
Problem definition:
Salons do not have enough control over time slots offered to clients booking online, meaning "bad" times for the salon staff member can be booked online. One churned client sums it up quite well:
"Clients are still able to destroy my day with dropping 30min appointments where ever they want."
An existing competitor solution for this is giving salon staff the option of restricting slots offered so that they are touching any of the following:
- start or end of the work time
- an existing appointment
- a break
This allows appointments to be built up together in blocks. This is offered by Timma in Finland and is a missed feature. It is a staff level feature (not a branch level feature).
I believe it would also help increase adoption of OB in other regions, who have a fear of opening their calendar to clients.
Very few people understand the existing feature (incl. internally) and it is not strict enough for some staff that honestly would rather have no appointment than a bad appointment.
Seán O'Sullivan
Colm O'Neill I was chatting with Sonja about something like this a few months back. There is a pitch written for it as well. It was aimed at the appointment builder but could be used for OB as well. The aim was to return "optimal" slots that would try and back to back appointments first.
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Colm O'Neill
Settings from Ovatu. Very clear, and I like how they have named the setting simply "Minimize gaps"
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Colm O'Neill
Here's a screenshot of the Magetic time settings from one of our competitors. To help salon staff feel like they have more control over their bookings, these kinds of settings should help build trust.
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Colm O'Neill
I came across a really simple example today of where our planner settings can let salons down - some salon staff would prefer if they could set it so that the customer would have only been offered 9-12 or 11:30-14:30 for this booking.
Btw, this is a staff level setting with our competitors as some busy staff want strict planning, and some who are not busy want to offer more flexibility to customers.
This is what we would call magnetic bookings / sticky bookings.
The booking that came in is floating in the middle of the day, meaning now she could only take 2 short bookings instead of one longer one.
Sonja Lorscheidt
Thanks, Colm. This is a problem for self-employed staff more than for employed staff, right?
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Colm O'Neill
Sonja Lorscheidt: Hey Sonja, the short answer is I don't know - we mainly have self employed staff here. But taking a high level view, those gaps cause "wasted" time for both employed and self employed staff. With staff on payroll I would assume owners would like their employees' time used as efficiently as possible. But maybe they have other odd jobs to give them like cleaning during those small gaps?
For self employed staff who have full control over their work times and not committed to staying at the salon, I would say that a poor schedule for the day does hurt more than an employee who knows they need to be at the salon all day anyway.
I think a good question to ask salon owners not using Online Bookings is - what's holding them back? We have pretty much 100% adoption in Finland of OB, but I know it's a lot less in other regions, i.e. salons are "required" by their customers to offer online bookings here.
In the UK and Ireland for example - my guess is that this lack of control over what times are offered on online bookings would be high on the list.
Would be interesting to know if salons give free choice to their customers when taking boookings in person / over the phone. In my experience they first offer times that suit the salon.
Here's a nice short and sweet article from Timely about it: