Creating Appointments

There are to ways in which appointments are created for your shop. Firstly, they can be booked online by customers via either your custom Velodrop.com booking page, or the embedded booking widget on your site. Secondly, they can be created by an employee through your shops admin dashboard.

From the dashboard

To create an appointment from the dashboard navigate to “Appointments” in the sidebar menu. From this page you can search for existing appointments or begin a new appointment by clicking the green “+” button to the left of the search bar.

The booking form

This will bring you to the booking form. The booking form consists of several sections that are as follows

  1.  Customer
  2. Appointment Date
  3. Bike 
  4. Packages and Services
  5. Other Information

Customer

In this section you can create a new customer or select from a list of existing customers. Just begin typing the customers first and last name, and the application will begin sorting through a list of customers already in the database. A drop down input will appear below the customer’s name containing relevant matches.  Browse the list and simply click the “Select” button to select an existing customer, or proceed without selecting to create a new customer on form submission.

Booking from the admin dashboard requires either a valid email address, or a valid phone number for the customer. It is not recommended, but if you really need to book an appointment for a customer with no contact information, you can do so by entering a dummy address in the email field, just be sure that it is not a real email address so not to spam anyone with appointment reminders and notifications. For example, you could use something like noreply@ your shop’s domain name. 

If the customer would like notifications and reminders to be sent as an SMS text message, ensure that the phone number given is an SMS enabled mobile phone and that the “Send notifications via SMS” toggle is set to “Yes“

Appointment Date

By default, the earliest available appointment date is already selected. Clicking on the date input will reveal a  date picker widget allowing you to select from all available future dates. Dates that are currently unavailable for booking are shown in red and can not be selected. This should be preferred on most cases, but there is an option available if you simply must book an appointment on a date that has already reached or exceeded its limit of appointments.

Below the date input you will see a checkbox labeled “Allow Override“. When this box is checked, all the booking management controls will be lifted and you can choose any date from the current day forward. You will even be able to select days where the shop is closed, so we suggest you use this feature with caution to avoid booking errors. 

Bike

A description of the customer’s bike including brand, model name, year, and colour is required for each appointment. If an existing customer was selected above, then all existing bikes associated with this customer will appear in a select input at the top of the section. Click on the input to choose from the list of customer’s bikes then click “Select” to select it. If you need to create a new bike, just continue filling out the form and a new bike will be attached to the customer upon submit. 

Packages and services

Select any packages relevant to the appointment booking. For each package selected, check boxes containing any services included with that package are automatically checked and disabled. This provides a good visual indicator of the service each packages represents.

After packages have been selected, you may continue by selecting any other services that were not already included.

If the customer is requesting services not included in your booking form, you should add them to the text area below in the “Other Information”  section.

Other Information

Add any extra information or services in the text area.

 A quote is automatically generated based on the cost of the selected services and packages. If you need to, you can change this to a more accurate value. 

If the customer wants to impose a spending limit on the service, place this value in the “Call If Over” input.

Bike received

If the customer is creating the appointment and dropping of the bike at the same time, set the value of “Bike Received” to “Yes“. Once a bike has been received, reminders for this appointment will be disabled. Otherwise select “No” if the customer will be dropping their bike off later to make sure that they will receive their appointment reminder at the appropriate time.

Booking multiple appointments for the same customer

Sometimes a customer will be booking multiple appointments at the same time. To make this process a little easier, after successfully creating a new appointment a link will appear at the end of the green success message box at the top of the page labelled “Book another appointment for this customer“.  Following this link will take you to a new booking form with the customer information already filled for you.

Printing the appointment slip

If you wish to give the customer a slip containing their appointment information, you can print it from the appointment page by clicking the “Print” button in the top right corner of the page.