There may be times when you want to prevent a client from booking their own appointments using the scheduler. This could be because you need to speak to the client before they can book an appointment, or because they have not attended their appointments in the past and you want to prevent them from booking anymore or for any number of other reasons.
To prevent a client from booking their own appointments, you'll need to go to the Client Details for Staff Use Only section on their client profile and click on the blue Edit button, and then adjust the value of the Client Status field -
In the Client Status dropdown you'll need to select Blocked and then click on the green Save button -
Next we'll define the scheduler's behavior when a blocked client attempts to book an appointment with you. To do this, you'll need to navigate to Settings > Client Information and click on the blue Edit button -
In the Client Blocked Mode dropdown you will see 2 options, GOBBLE or BLOCK -
GOBBLE - This option will show blocked clients the normal appointment saved message that gets shown to all clients after they book an appointment from your scheduler, but instead of saving the appointment it will automatically get cancelled. Clients will not receive a canceled appointment message.
BLOCK - This option will show blocked clients a custom message that lets them know that they've been blocked from making appointments on your scheduler.
You will also be able to customize the message that gets shown to blocked clients if you select the Block option in the field seen highlighted in red above! For this example, we have set the Client Blocked Mode to BLOCK, and have set the Client Blocked Message to "Unfortunately, this email address has been blocked from booking appointments with us. Please contact the office to schedule an appointment!" -
When a client that has been blocked goes to book an appointment on your scheduler and enters their email address on the Client Information panel, TimeTap will run a check and if the client has been blocked the blocked message will get displayed once they try to save an appointment -
A few things to consider when blocking clients -
- Blocking is based on the email address saved on the client's profile. TimeTap checks the email address that gets provided on the Client Information panel against all the clients saved on your account to see if the client has been blocked.
- The Add Appointment button in the Backoffice gets disabled on the client's profile as well as the Clients List if they have been blocked.
- Appointments can not be added for blocked clients from the Backoffice.
To allow a client to be able to book appointments again, you'll need to go to their profile and change the value of the Client Status field back to Active -