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!

[Devon]

I’m so grateful to YOU @s4Bb for being a Square seller, and for using Square Appointments! What I love about Appointments is that I get to interact with so many self-made entrepreneurs. That’s why we made the product free for individuals-- we want to empower people with the tools and services they need to turn their skills into a real, solid business, and we think appointment booking is so critical to how they work that it should be part of our free Point of Sale offering! Thank you for that comment, you’ve made my day 😀

On to your requests!

Class bookings - This is something we’ve talked a lot about. We know there’s a need here, but it seems like something that’s very different from booking 1:1 appointments. What kinds of classes do you offer?

Docs that are HIPAA compliant - Definitely an idea we’ve explored, but we have no plans to build this soon. We’re still working on getting the core functionality of appointment scheduling really remarkable, before we move onto automating things like intake forms and agreeing to terms/conditions. That said, we may be able to support a version of this by way of allowing customers to upload PDFs and Images when booking appointments, but we haven’t yet fully committed to doing this soon.

Customization of the booking page - I’ve heard this loud and clear. I’ve got a question back to you -- what would you like to customize? If everything looked the same but the color matched your brand, and you could customize the fonts-- would that be enough?

Confirmations - Yep, heard this loud and clear as well. No solid plans to build it quite yet, but it’s on our radar.

Privacy - I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to accomplish here. When do you want the customer to show up with only one letter for their last name? And when would you like to know the full last name of the customer?

[toniescut]

If we have multiple staff members managing their own schedules can we set up links to their schedules individually as well? Or it has to go grouch and they have to pick the person in booking for the group? 

[tmtuohy]

I love the current Appointments functionality but I desperately need to interact with it via an "Appointments REST API" or other programmatic interface.   I'm hoping Devon can speak to that during this Q&A.  I can provide more specifics but in general, I'll say that opening up the Appointments functionality will give your Developer Clients a much wider set of options for interacting with this product and truly make it a world class Appointment booking and management system.

Thanks for listening!

[Devon]

Hey @tmtuohy! We are not currently planning on releasing an open-ended API for Appointments, but we have begun exploring opening up a limited API with a few select partners. I’d love to learn more about what you’d like to build on top of Appointments, so that if and when we open up our API, we can definitely empower you to use it!

[tmtuohy]

Hi Devon,

Thanks for the reply.  In my particular business model, I need to treat different types of things as "bookable resources".  I may need to book 2 unrelated resource types for one particular appointment.  Between the time I've first asked this question, I've since found an appointment management solution that I believe will work for me.  If interested, please take a look at: https://developers.timekit.io/reference - This API functionality is very similar to what I'd like to see from Square Appointments and would suit all of my needs as well as integrate nicely with all of the other Square offerings.

Although quite a bit more expensive than Square Appointments, I'm going to give timekit.io a try and hope that it satisfies my needs with respect to Appointment Management.  I do look forward to seeing something similar from the folks at Square as I would love to have Square manage all of my integrations, (POS, CRM, Payroll, etc.).

[MarkyFresh]

Hello Devon, i own a barbershop and we do booking thru square with great success. building an app right now for ios and android would love to see the great user experience thru the app as they can thru the website. Would love to get in contact and discuss options for that. or how soon would api be availbable to plugin. email us !! [Personal Information Redacted]

[bgcht]

Hello, just discovered square appointments and it's perfect for me. I'm just really mad I can't delete a location I made on accident and it really made my good mood disappear. Now I always have a notification telling me to link my bank to the new location that I don't even want. Make inactive locations actually inactive and MAKE THEM GO AWAY! Why can't we delete locations? Why?

[Devon]

Thanks for this feedback @bgcht! Another team is responsible for locations, so I can’t really answer your question since I wasn’t a part of that decision making process. I will pass this on to the responsible group because I can imagine how frustrating this must be.

[tmtuohy]

Another question for Devon:  Can we somehow capture or retrieve the "Reschedule" dynamic link that was sent to the Appointment Maker in their confirmation email?  I would like to use this link in my website when my client is logged in and it will take them right to that appointment to take any necessary action, instead of making them try to dig for the info from an email.  On that subject, I'm really disappointed that the only way our clients can get this info is to dig it out of an email.  My clients will mostly be operating from within my website and it is imperative that I give them access to reschedule their appointments from within my site.

Thanks,

Tom Tuohy

[Devon]

@tmtuohy - We’re actively working on a logged-in customer experience for our Online Booking Site. When a customer logs in, they will see a list of their past and upcoming appointments, and you’ll be able to link to that list from your website 😀 I can’t tell you when this will be launched, but I can say that we are indeed actively working on it.

[electrologist]

I really would like access to input notes to my clients there PLEASEEEEEE

[electrologist]

 @Devon the new client side of online booking- can i have access to put personal notes there? pleaseeeee

[inresonance]

Can there be additional time options for email reminders. The furthest out time option is 3 days but I like to send out reminders 5-6 days ahead of time to allow time for rescheduling. I called and requested this about 1 year ago and I do not see that it has changed yet.

I would also like to request that when a client reschedules that I am alerted to the time and date of the original appointment that was being rescheduled.

It would be great to have a recoding of this Q&A for all of those who cannot be on it live.

Thank You.

[Devon]

This is a great suggestion, @inresonance -- I’ll add it to our backlog now. We hope to make time for more small improvements like these going forward, so I’ll see what I can do to get it done.

If a customer reschedules their own appointment, you should be able to see the original date and time from the Overview page on our Web Dashboard. This is not currently possible on iOS, but that is on our radar.

[BrennaTKHS]

-will be soon be given the Option to give services a category like Haircut or Color Sercive for tracking purposes  when checking out clients under “appointments” app like it does in POS

[Devon]

This is a common source of feedback that we hear, and we’re actively working on fixing this, @BrennaTKHS. I can’t say when it’ll be fixed, but rest assured it’s on our radar! Do you have a work around for this currently? Others might be interested in hearing how you’re solving this right now.

[brittp0p]

We need a combine transactions feature for multiple appointments paid by the same person, such as parents and children, husbands and wives, and bffs fighting over the bill! Is this in the works?

[Devon]

We get this request a *lot*, and suffice it to say that it’s pretty high up on our list of things to potentially work on. I can’t promise when we’ll be looking at it, but I understand how helpful this would be and I’d like us to be able to make this process of checking out multiple customers at once, much easier for you @brittp0p.

[internetzorro]

How do we allow multiple customers to book an appointment with the same staff member at the same time?  Currently the system tells the customer that the staff is not available.

[Devon]

That is how the system works today-- one staff member can only handle one appointment at a time.

I’d love to better understand how and when your staff members are able to take multiple appointments at a time. Is it simply that your clients don’t take 100% of your attention, and therefore you can see multiple people at once, no matter what the service being performed?

Or are there specific services that have time built in where you can accommodate another client-- the example I’ve heard a lot for this is a “color treatment” in hair care where the color is applied and then needs 30 minutes to process before it can be finished. During that 30 minutes, the service provider could take another quick client.

Or is it different than both of these cases? I would love to better understand what you need, @internetzorro 😁

[internetzorro]

Devon, we operate a gymnastics studio.  We use appointments for private lessons and makeup sessions for missed classes where the instructor often has two or three separate clients together.  Of course we can book these manually, because the dashboard booking allows "conflicts", but customers cannot use the customer-side web booking for this, because it blocks out the space on the first booking.

Also, I am confused over the pricing--has there been a pricing change?  You referenced above the idea of setting up phantom staff to accomplish multiple.  If I add phantom staff, how is the pricing affected?