Hi Sellers! 👋
We’ve been testing an early version of Waitlist, a feature that helps you fill schedule gaps caused by appointment cancellations, reschedules, or no-shows. We heard your feedback on how we can improve the Waitlist feature for your business, and are excited to announce two enhancements: 1) you can now track your client’s availability with date/time fields and 2) automatically notify clients when their availability matches a schedule opening.
Buyer Availability Preference Update
When clients join your waitlist via your online booking site, the Join Waitlist screen will now show a date/time picker, pre-filled to the date viewed in the online booking site. Clients will also be able to add up to 5 availability preferences.
As a result of these updates, any existing waitlist requests will not show an availability preference on Dashboard or on the mobile app, but will appear as a note from customer. You’ll be able to manually add an availability preference for the client using the new date/time picker.
Left: new Online Booking Join Waitlist experience, Right: new add to waitlist flow
Automatically Notify Clients Update
With automation, whenever an appointment cancellation or rescheduling occurs, all clients on the waitlist with matching availability preference will receive a notification. Square will send bothSMS and email notifications according to the client’s notification preferences. We will also respect the “appointments must be made in advance” setting (i.e. if clients can only book appointments 1 day in advance, if a cancellation occurs the day of, clients on the waitlist will not receive a notification).
If a client books an appointment (regardless of whether or not it was with the same service/staff previously selected) through the link sent in the notification message, their waitlist entries will be automatically removed. Waitlist entries are not automatically removed for pending or declined appointments, only for accepted appointments.
Automated Client Notification with link to book schedule opening
Note: The Waitlist feature is available to Square Appointments Plus or Premium subscribers.
We hope these features save you time by making it easy to find clients whose availability preferences match an opening, or by automating the matching and notification process entirely.
The new availability preference fields are already available in the Online Booking and Add to Waitlist flows. No action is needed on your part.
You can allow clients to join the waitlist on your Online Booking Site and turn on the automation feature on your Appointments Dashboard by going to Online Booking > Settings > Waitlist.