Announcement posted by fieldd 31 Jul 2020
Online booking platforms are often only designed to deliver half of the customer experience. As a result, a business gets less repeat customers, and staff become frustrated due to lost time coordinating with workers and administrators.
For many service companies this results in 3 critical staff scheduling bottlenecks:
1. Appointments aren’t fulfilled by staff
The online bookings they receive are simply “job requests” with a preferred time that the client has asked for. These job requests still require a dispatcher to manually schedule a suitable time with the right staff member. This can also cause your company to lose the job, as most people want the service immediately, and 9am can be a very popular request time.
2. Staff members are not available at the time that was scheduled
Employees are unavailable due to the online booking portal being unable to quickly update their live availability. Generally to update staff availability on their calendar, staff that can be booked on the online booking portals need to either report to admin, to update their availability or, enter the event into both the online booking portal software, and their normal mobile phone calendar. Unless staff are actively monitoring and updating their availability, staff often get double booked.
3. Scheduling the wrong staff member for the job
There are two common ways this occurs:
a) The online booking portal cannot quickly factor in locations. Or, it requires the customer to know which location is the best location to select, often ending in the wrong location being selected.
b) The online booking portal cannot sort staff by skillsets. So at times it will suggest an available time, but an unqualified staff member is booked for the job.
What if there was a better way to schedule staff?
This would require online booking software to considered every variable that an office manager takes into account before suggesting an available time slot.
Let’s learn how fieldd’s Smart Staff Appointment Scheduling App does exactly this so you can guarantee your online booking availability.
1. Set a Company Schedule
Office admins can set their regular weekly company schedule from the fieldd CRM. They restrict staff to work within these hours, or allow staff to do overtime outside of these hours.
2. Determine Individual Staff Schedules
By default, staff will be on the company schedule. From the fieldd app, staff can set both their regular schedule, and their time off schedule. Both calendars are synced live instantly.
3. Two-Way Sync with Google Calendar
Should you add an event in your Google Calendar, it will auto update your availability in your fieldd app. When an online booking is received through fieldd, it will sync and show in your staff’s google calendar. This unique feature stops your team being double booked, and saves your staff, and office admin team constantly updating schedules.
4. View, Track and Edit Availability from the CRM
Every change a staff member makes to their schedule via their mobile app, will be recorded in the fieldd CRM. This transparent solution allows admin to quickly modify their schedule when required.
5. Schedule Staff based on Location
The fieldd app auto detects which city and zone the address is in, then discovers which staff members are in this zone. This auto method of filtering staff by locations means your customers don’t have to guess which is the best location for them when booking. It also ensures your staff aren’t travelling inefficiently, which makes them run behind schedule or results in increase fuel costs. To learn more about our location based staff scheduling, visit fieldd.co/ai
6. Schedule Staff based on Qualifications
Our fieldd app auto filters and schedules staff based on which services they are able to perform. For example, some of your staff may only be able to perform junior services, and the more complex ones need to be performed by your advanced technicians.
7. Consider Crews when Scheduling Staff
Should the service require multiple staff or a “crew”, fieldd will automatically match staff availability and only suggest times that a crew could perform the service. You can also flag staff members as foreman, where they will be in charge of the crew and be the only person who can contact and update the client during the service.
Start Scheduling Your Staff Better Today
The fieldd Smart Staff Appointment Scheduling App is re-defining service companies around the globe. Discover a better way to schedule your staff with our online booking portal by getting started here: fieldd.me/start
Try fieldd free for 1-2 users, and priced per job, per feature which allows service companies of all sizes to grow and scale without large monthly software fees affecting their cashflow. Learn more about our pricing: fieldd.co/pricing