How do I manage Services in a Bookings calendar?

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Bookings Services

When you define your service offerings in Microsoft Bookings, you set a service name, description, location (choose whether you want to meet in person or have an online meeting), duration, default reminders to customers and staff and internal notes about the service. You can also assign the employees who are qualified to provide the service.

Then, when people come to your booking page to book an appointment, they can see exactly what types of appointments are available and choose the person they want to provide the service.

Define your service offerings in Bookings

To access your advertised services select ‘Manage services’ from the left-hand side of your Bookings dashboard.

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Add a service

Basic details

1. From within ‘Manage services’, select ‘Add service’ from the top
2. Enter a service name
3. Add a service description
4. Enter a meeting location
   Check ‘Add online meeting’ if you want to host the service via Microsoft Teams. Meeting invitations will are sent out automatically when the service is booked.
5. Enter the service duration (30 minute default)
6. Add an optional buffer time to ensure that the staff providing the service have enough time between bookings
7. Set the cost/pricing to ‘Price not set’ or ‘Free’
8. Add any additional service notes
9. Set the maximum number of attendees for the service, selecting greater than 1 attendee will cause the service to be created as a group service.
   
   Please note: Once a service has been created it, cannot be changed to a 1:1 or group service, you must recreate the service to achieve this.
   
   
10. Checking ‘Let customers manage their appointment when it was booked by you or your staff on their behalf’ will allow users to manage their own bookings even if has been booked on their behalf.

Availability options

By default, all new services will use the default online scheduling policy set in the Business information section of your Booking calendar dashboard. If you want to customise the availability of an individual service you’ll need to uncheck ‘Use the default online scheduling policy’.

Time increments: This defines the available timeslots for a service

Minimum lead time: This defines the minimum lead time for bookings and cancellations

Maximum lead time: This defines the maximum number of days a booking can be made in advance

Availability: You can leave this set to ‘Bookable when staff are free’ to advertise all available slots in the assigned staff members calendar. To reduce the availability to selected days, choose ‘Customised hours (recurring weekly)’ then set up the Mon-Fri schedule as desired.

To alter the availability during a specific date range select ‘Set different availability for a date range’.

Assign staff

If you want to allow users to choose who their booking is with, check the ‘Allow customers to choose a particular staff for booking’ option. Select a staff member from your staff list to assign them to the service.

Please note: You’ll need to add the desired service providers to your staff list before they’re available to assign to a service.

Customised fields

We recommend using the ‘Customer email’ field however other data collection fields should be used with caution.

It is essential that all members of the University, staff and students, play their part in safeguarding the availability, integrity, confidentiality and authenticity of the information they hold or access. The misappropriation of University information not only has the potential to cause reputation damage and disruption to the University’s business but may also expose the organisation to the risk of legal sanctions. Additionally and importantly the loss or inadvertent disclosure of personal information can cause a significant amount of distress to the people whose information is affected.

For further information please see the Information Assurance website.

Reminders and notifications

Microsoft Bookings will send out reminders and notifications about bookings automatically, the default settings are helpful however we recommend customising these settings on a per-service basis.

Leave the following options selected:

• Notify the business via email when a booking is created or changed
• Send a meeting invite to the customer, in addition to the confirmation email

Additional information can be added to your email confirmations.

By default, a generic reminder will be sent 1 day before the booking. You may wish to adjust this to 30 minutes before the booking or add additional email reminders by selecting ‘Add an email reminder’.

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Edit a service

1. To access your advertised services select ‘Manage services’ from the left-hand side of your Bookings dashboard
2. Hover your mouse of the service you want to edit, then select the Pencil icon
3. Customise the service settings as desired.

Please note: If you’re editing a 1:1 service, you cannot increase the max number of attendees. When editing a group service, you cannot reduce the max number of attendees to 1. To achieve this, you’ll need to recreate the service.

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Remove a service

1. To access your advertised services select ‘Manage services’ from the left-hand side of your Bookings dashboard
2. Hover your mouse of the service you want to edit, then select the Bin icon
3. Choose Delete to confirm

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