Hey everyone! We’re excited to announce some significant enhancements and fixes to elevate your experience and streamline your operations. Here’s what’s included in this week’s software update:
New Features
- Travel Settings: If you set “Travel Enabled” for a given service, you can allow your clients to request that you travel to them. You can set an additional cost as well. Any appointment where the client requests travel will have to be manually confirmed.
- Address Visibility: You can turn off your “Address Visibility” in the Business Settings of your store. This will prevent users from seeing the address of your store until you confirm their appointment. This is great for individuals working out of private residences, or just want an extra layer of privacy.
- Open Chair (Customer Waitlists): The Open Chair feature is now fully operational! If you set “Open Chair” to enabled in your Store Settings, you’ll allow clients to be added to a waitlist for an already booked time-slot. If that timeslot becomes available through some sort of cancellation, your clients on the waitlist will be notified that the time is now available for them to book. This feature helps keep your booking agenda busy!
- Recurring Appointments: Have clients that see you on a regular basis? They can setup a recurring appointment, that will automatically generate new bookings on a consistent schedule between you and the client.
New Enhancements
- Location Picker: We’ve enhanced the Store location picker to give the provider more control. Not only does it utilize Google Maps’ “Autocomplete” feature when searching for a location, but if you can’t find your specific location, you can manually edit the address and set the map pin. This also fixes an issue where some Providers were seeing the wrong town/city being set on their address.
- Chat Message Counts: We added in chat message counts so you can quickly see which chat message threads have been read or not per appointment
- In-App Booking Links: To ensure that the booking experience is a consistent one, we’ve made sure that your booking link brings you to the same exact page that your clients would see if they clicked on your link from Instagram, Facebook, or wherever else they’d be set.
New Fixes
- Removed Manual Appointments Restrictions: We’ve fixed an issue where Manual Appointments were being restricted by booking dates, windows, and other rules that would normally be on a client. We realize that as a Provider, you’d want the freedom to be able to book whenever you want. This could cause an issue with unintended double-bookings, so we made sure to include a pop-up notification that warns you if a manual appointment will double book you for a certain time. We also give you the option to continue with the double-booking, if that’s what you need. The choice is all yours!
- Manual Appointment Notifications: On the topic of manual appointments, we noticed that some Providers weren’t getting a notification that their client actually accepted and paid for the manual appointment that was created for them. So we added text, email and push notifications to the Provider to let you know that your manual appointment was accepted.
- Customer Appointment Edits: There was an issue where some clients couldn’t edit their appointments while it was still pending confirmation. We made sure to resolve that so Providers wouldn’t have to go in an manually make change requests to their clients.
- Away Date Edits: Not only did we add away dates to the Agenda screen, but we made sure to allow Providers to be able to edit their away dates directly from that screen.
- Clarified Appointment Payments: We realized the way we displayed “Deposit” and “Remaining Balance” payments were confusing both our Providers, their Clients, and even some of our Dev team! We cleaned it up by specifying only the required deposit during checkout, and both the deposit and the remaining balance afterward. Before the deposit is paid, we label it “Pending Confirmation” and after it is paid, it’s labeled “Paid”. Hopefully this clears up a lot of confusion!
Overall, we’re committed to providing you with the best possible tools and support to help you thrive in your service-based business. Thank you for choosing our platform, and we look forward to continuing to serve you. Stay tuned for more updates as the weeks go by. We have some really cool new features and enhancements planned. And as always, please feel free to contact support with any issues you may have. ChairWatch is a software built for you, the Providers.
– Sincerely, The ChairWatch Development Team