Live Q&A: Ask us anything about Square Appointments

[katieand]

On April 11th, we hosted a Live Q&A about Square Appointments. We recently announced we changed our pricing for the product, and made it free for Individuals. We had the Square Appointments Product Manager, Devon Meyer, here to answer any of your questions about the new price change or getting the most out of Square Appointments for your business!

@Devon has been part of the Square Appointments team for almost four years. He started as an engineer, and is now the Product lead. In that time, he’s interviewed more than 100 Appointments sellers, and knows how important it is to give service providers their time back so they can focus on providing a great client experience.

A couple example questions:

• What does the pricing change mean for individuals?
• How can I use Appointments to check out my customers when their service ends?
• How can I protect myself from no-shows?

Thanks in advance! Cheers!

[Mrt90]

Is there a way where you can block someone from booking from you in the future? Not just declining their appointment, but physically blocking them.

[Devon]

Hi @Mrt90 - We are actively working on building a logged-in experience for buyers who visit your Online Booking Site. This allows us to ‘remember’ buyers when they return to your site to book another appointment.

Once we have the ability to ‘remember’ who your buyers are, it makes it easier for us to provide custom experiences when they are booking an appointment-- for example, suggesting services that they may want to book again, or in this example, preventing them from booking at all!

So we’re not actively working on this specific feature, but we are working on something that we can build upon to fit your specific needs.

[Lphair99]

1. Will I be charged April 1st or for the service since its been announced its free?

2. What features will be added or taken away?

3. When will it be released to android? Please!!

4. Any talk about google reserve integration?

5. Customer login and profiles being added?

6. Can we block clients?

7. Can we have certain service need a deposit and others not?

8. Even though I have a set location can you make it so I can book on location appointments?

9. If you don’t add login or customer profiles can you add the ability to only have to add card once when making appointment, not every time? (GlossGenius does this)

10. Tell us whats on the road map, for real this year?

[Devon]

So hopefully you’ve seen by now that you were not billed on the 1st, @Lphair99! And if you’re in our sole proprietor tier, and have no employees on your account, your experience using Appointments should be exactly the same.

Android is in progress-- we’ve just launched an early access program for a very early stage version of the app. If you’re interested in joining, please post in this thread and we’ll follow up via email.

Google Reserve is very interesting to us. I can’t say anything as of right now, but rest assured it’s on our radar.

Customer Login is being actively worked on as we speak. We’re going to start small by allowing your buyers to save their *personal* information, and take a look at their previous / upcoming appointments. We know we should also add the ability to save *payment* information for those sellers who use No Show Protection or Online Prepayments-- I can’t tell you when that will happen, but it is something we plan to do once we’ve launched the first phase. Once we address these two basic pieces of functionality, we can build more value into this login, such as allowing you to block specific clients from booking

Today we do not support deposits-- but if you’re talking about using No-Show Protection and requiring credit cards / having a no-show fee that is customizable based on the service, I’m happy to say that this is also something we’re actively working on!

You can book appointments at multiple locations! See this support article for more details! If you mean you’d like to take some appointments at your ‘set location’ and some at a location of the clients choosing-- you can achieve that by setting “Where do you take appointments” to “At my location and the client’s location” in your business settings on dashboard.

What else is on the roadmap? Frankly we’ve covered a lot of it here 🙂 The trouble with sharing our roadmap is that our priorities may shift, and with that so will projects and timelines. I’ve promised Customer Login to sellers I’ve interviewed in the past, thinking we’d be working on it in an upcoming quarter, only to have something else come up that we needed to go work on, which then pushed that project out. Now I’ve made a promise to a seller that I couldn’t keep.

I can tell you that we’re actively working on Android, Customer Login, and a closer integration between Services and the rest of the Items in your Item Library. Beyond that, I can tell you that we’ve got big, ambitious plans for the rest of the year, filled with projects we’ve picked based on the feedback from you and other sellers like you.

[NextGenCryo]

How can clients book reoccurring appointments?

[Devon]

Thanks for the question, @NextGenCryo. Today clients cannot book their own repeating appointments -- they have to book them one at a time. We are currently working on a logged-in experience to make it easier for your buyers to book more than one appointment at a time without re-entering their personal information. They can also call you and ask you to book an appointment for them, which you can set to repeat every day, every other day, every week, every other week, etc.

[Preslie]

What time zone? How do we watch the Q&A?

[katieand]

Hi @Preslie - I just added in that it's PST. Thanks for catching that! 

Devon will be answering the questions in live time during that block on April 11th, so there isn't any video component. You can watch the page for his answers as they roll in. Feel free to add your question and you'll receive an answer on April 11th!

[Preslie]

Great, thank you so much! 🙂 

[Statichair]

Where is the live Q&A

[Devon]

I'm answering questions now @Statichair!

[Agent929]

A lot of want to know if there is actually an Android app in the making. We would appreciate an educated answer, not a canned response. Thank you .

[Devon]

I’m happy to say that it is in the making, @Agent929, and that we’ve just kicked off an early access program. If you’d like to join that early access program, please reply to this thread!

[ob1luca]

Will this ever automatically synch with the icloud calendar?

I am alone but I offer services my clients do not need me for, how can I add that without adding a "ghost" staff member?

[GELLC]

This kept me from getting square appointments for quite some time. I bit the bullet and just had it pushed to ical through my google calendar. Seemed complicated at first but it was a super easy work-around and my clients love that I use it. I haven't had a no show since.

[Devon]

I’m so glad to hear that Appointments has been working for you, @GELLC! I’m sorry you have to deal with that workaround for us not supporting iCal sync. I talked about iCal Sync in more depth in a previous reply -- check it out above 👆!

[Devon]

👋 @ob1luca - iCal Sync is definitely a feature request we’ve heard, but so far we’ve found that there aren’t as many folks who’d benefit from it as, say, an Android App, which is currently in the making. That said, the more we hear from sellers like you that it would be valuable, the more quickly we’ll get to building it.

If I understand your second question correctly, there is unfortunately no way for clients to book an appointment that is not associated with a staff member, so in this case you would need to create a “ghost” staff 👻

[IntuitHealing]

Will I be losing anything in the service i already use?

will you develope a way for appointments to sync to calendars?

When clients book online- they get a generated response- but when they book instore that response does not generate will this be fixed?

why are you changing it to free.. i'm not complaining just trying to find the moative...?

Will marketing emails cost additional price?

[Devon]

Will you be losing anything, @IntuitHealing? Nope!

Appointments already sync with Google Calendar! We do not currently sync with other calendars such as iCal or Outlook -- if that’d be something you’d like to see, please reply to this with more information about how you use that other calendar, and why an integration with that calendar would help you out!

You’re right that appointments booked by clients via Online Booking automatically generate confirmation notifications via email and text. You also have the option to send a confirmation when you book an appointment from your Desktop or iOS App -- here are some details about how that works.

[s4Bb]

I'm so grateful that you guys have listened to the little people like me who love Square (and use all of the other products) but were getting priced out.  Here are my questions for the Q&A to add to your list:

• Online class bookings?
• Online docs (intake, terms/conditions, notes) that are HIPAA compliant?
• Customization of fonts/colors on booking page?
• Customer confirmations of appointments via text or email?
• Privacy of patients/customer identity?  To clarify: Customers/Patients are listed according to how their information is kept in their profile. In order to know who the person is but still try and protect identify, I am having to put a letter for the last name in the profile, which means that when it comes to payments, there is just the person and no last name.  There must be a way to put a nickname, number, or initials for patient appointments without losing the ability to personalize messages or input last names into square register every time.