Staff Panel Settings

The Staff panel is the page of your Client Scheduler where clients can choose the person they are scheduling their appointment with. If you have the Staff panel included in your booking flows, you can make edits to the elements of this panel by going to Settings > Staff > Staff Panel Settings - 

 

This will pull up the Staff Panel Settings window - 

The Staff Panel Settings window allows you to make customizations to the following - 

• Panel Title - Set the title of the staff panel here - by default this just reads as "Staff", but you can change it to be "Therapists" if you run a Massage Therapy practice or "Photographer" if you run a photography studio, etc.

• No Preference - Determines whether to show the No Preference option - this is great for businesses where it doesn't matter which staff clients meet with for a particular service.

• No Preference label - Set the label for the No Preference option - by default this reads as "No Preference", but you can change it so that it says whatever you want it to say.

• Book Staff In Order - Determines whether when clients are going to book appointments the appointments will get assigned to staff based on their sort order. The staff who is first in your list will get first priority for appointments, and so on down your list of staff. 

• Randomize Staff -  Determines whether to display the staff listed on the Staff panel in a different and randomized order each time a clients progresses through your scheduler. This helps to ensure that all staff get an equal chance of appear at the top of the list if you allow your clients to choose between multiple staff options.

• No Staff Error Message - Set the error message that will show if clients go to book an appointment and no staff are available to book with once they reach the Staff panel in the scheduling flow. 

• Header Text - You can enter some text to explain a little bit more about the Staff panel to your clients.

The default panel settings shown in the image above create a nice but generic look for your Staff panel when clients are booking - 

Let's say you make a few changes to your Staff Panel Settings so that the Panel Title now reads "Consultants" (1), you have opted to show the "No Preference" option (2) and you have added a bit of detail text to the top of the screen (3) - 

After you save your changes to the Staff Panel Settings window, here's how they would appear on the Client Scheduler - 

 

This is great if you have a business where some clients prefer to meet with specific members of your staff and others don't have a preference of which staff they meet with. If a client chooses that they have "No Preference" on which staff to book with, then they will see available appointment times for all staff that offer the class or service they are booking. 

If a client selects an appointment time that only Staff 1 has available, then the appointment will be assigned to Staff 1 - if the client selects an appointment time that both Staff 1 and Staff 2 have available, then the appointment will be randomly assigned to 1 of the 2 staff members. 

When multiple staff are available for an appointment time slot, then the no preference option assigns appointments completely at random. There is no weighting put on which staff gets appointment priority when the client chooses no preference. 

This may seem obvious, but I think it's worth noting that this feature is not beneficial if you only have 1 staff person on your account. If you only have 1 staff person than the appointments will always be assigned to that staff person. Again, fairly obvious, but worth a mention.

You can turn on the "No Preference" option by going to Settings > Staff > Staff Panel Settings - 

On the Staff Panel Settings window that appears, change the No Preference dropdown from "Hide 'No Preference' Option" to "Show 'No Preference' Option" and then click on the green Save Changes button -