Booking site: let your customers book appointments online

A booking site makes it easy for your customers to book appointments online. They can book an appointment directly 24/7 from this booking site. The appointments planned by your customers are automatically added to the AntsRoute software. To set up your booking site, simply follow these simple steps:

• Step 1: Fill in the general information
• Step 2: Define the types of appointment
• Step 3: Customise the style
• Step 4: Finalise the creation of the booking site
• Automatically send a confirmation notification to the customer (optional)

💡 The booking site is available from the Pro package.

⚠️ To book an appointment through your booking site, customers must first create an account. A confirmation SMS will then be sent to them. Therefore, you need to have SMS credits available in order to use this feature.

💡 A booking site is associated with a single AntsRoute site. If you have several sites on AntsRoute, you can create a booking site for each of your sites. The URL of a booking site is unique. If you want to create several booking sites, you will need to define different URLs for each of your booking sites.

Step 1: Fill in the general information

1. Go to the “Settings” module.
2. Click on the “Booking site” tab.
3. Click on the “Start” button.

General information

1. Define the “URL of the booking site”.
2. Determine the “Page title” that is displayed on the home page of the booking site.
3. Add a “Quick description” which is visible below the title.

About the company

1. Add a “Title”, for example the name of your company.
2. Enter an overview of your company in the “About” section.
3. Add the “URL of your website”.
4. Add the “Expertise and certification” if necessary.
5. Add up to 10 “Photos”.

Privacy policy

1. Add the “URL of your privacy policy”.
2. Enter a “Message about the use of data”.
3. Click on the “Next step” button.

Step 2: Define the types of appointment

The types of service correspond to the types of appointments offered for online booking. When booking online, your customers must select a type of service. Each type of service is associated with a duration in minutes. You can also specify the skills required to carry out a particular type of service, as well as a time slot that must be respected.

1. Select the “Service types” that will be offered on the booking site.
2. If necessary, activate the “Display the price of deliveries” option.
3. Select the “Time slots” that will be offered on the booking site if your service types do not contain any.
4. Choose the “Module for adding deliveries”.
5. Determine the “Maximum distance (mi) authorized to add a first delivery in a route”.
6. Determine the “Maximum authorized distance (mi) to add extra delivery”.
7. Determine the “Number of days from the current day from which customers can book the delivery”.
8. Define whether your customers can modify their delivery appointment.
9. Select the “Custom fields” that your customers will need to fill in.
10. Click on the “Next step” button.

☝️ Good to know: If you have not yet added any service types, you can create them directly from this page by clicking on the “Add a type” button. On the other hand, if you want to modify existing types of service, you need to go to “Settings” > “Types of service”.

☝️ Good to know: The price of work orders can only be displayed if you use the function to define a rule for calculating the price of work orders.

💡 If you set a maximum distance for adding deliveries, your booking site will not offer availabilities that add more kilometres to the route than the set limit.

💡 The “Number of days from the current day from which customers can book the delivery” function prevents customers from selecting a date that is too close to today's date. For example, if you set the value to “3”, your customers will be able to book a service or delivery in at least 3 days' time.

☝️ Notes:
If you usually schedule your jobs from the “Basket of work orders” tab, you can select the option “Add work orders in the work orders basket tab” for the “Module for adding work orders” field.

If you choose this option, you can enable or disable “Allow customer to choose an availability window.”

• If enabled: you set the “Number of days from the current day from which customers can book a delivery” (= more flexibility for the end customer).
• If disabled: the customer does not choose a time window, and you set the “Number of days to add to the booking date to set the due date.” For example, if you enter 15 and your customer books on October 10, the due date will be October 25 (= more flexibility for the company).

Choose how your customers can modify their delivery appointment.

Three options are available:

• No changes allowed
  Customers cannot change the date of their appointment from the booking site.
• Self-rescheduling
  Customers can reschedule their appointment themselves by selecting a new date from the available options.
• Reschedule request
  Customers can request to have their delivery rescheduled to another date. The delivery is then moved back to the delivery basket so that your team can reschedule it.

Step 3: Customise the style

1. Add the URL of the “Logo for the booking site”.
2. Set the “Main color of your booking site”.
3. Click on the “Save” button.

☝️ Good to know: On the right of the screen, you can access an overview of your booking site.

Step 4: Finalise the creation of the booking site

1. Retrieve the URL of your booking site by clicking on the “Copy” button.
2. Click on the “Close” button.

Automatically send a confirmation notification to the customer (optional)

You can automatically send a notification to your customers as soon as an appointment is scheduled through the booking site. To do this, follow these two steps:

Step 1: Set the default status of appointments to “Confirmed”

This ensures that any appointment scheduled via the booking site is automatically marked as confirmed.
To do this, go to:

• Settings > Settings > Default values
• In the Default state of work orders section, select Confirmed.

Step 2: Set up automatic notification sending

Next, you need to create a notification template that will be triggered automatically when an appointment is confirmed.

Go to: Notifications > Notification templates > Click Add

• Choose the desired sending channel (email or Text message).
• Select the type On confirmation of a work order.
• Give your template a name.
• Write the content of the confirmation message.

👉 Once the template is saved, a notification will be automatically sent to your customers as soon as they schedule an appointment through the booking site.