Appointments problem. Why was customer told wrong time?

[DaoDeJing]

A group of people arrived at 6:30 pm for an appointment, but my dashboard and my email confirmation tells me they booked for 7:30 pm. I was not able to accomodate them early, and they didn't want to wait for 7:30, so I lost about $80 and upset several potential customers.

They showed me their confirmation text message that displayed 6:30.

Looking more closely at my confirmation email, below the 7:30 time it says in greyed out text "Client local time 6:30".

They said they made the booking through a browser on their iPad, over wifi at their home in town (clearly same time zone as me). They said the booking page asked them to confirm their time zone, with something like "select which one is your current time". They did so, and then proceeded with the booking.

Why would the booking page have even asked their time zone? Perhaps the iPad was originally activated in a different zone? But don't iPads automatically adjust based on their internet connection, so the location it was activated shouldn't matter?

My best guess is that she made an error when giving her time zone. (Which might be fixed if the site asks for their time zone by name. But according to the guest the site instead asked something like "select your current time" and she may have made an error that way.) But even if this is all simply due to the customer selecting the wrong time zone, it's odd that she would have been asked for her time zone to begin with.

Any idea what might have happened here?

[katieand · Accepted solution]

Hi @DaoDeJing - Sorry this happened! I was able to find a similar looking thread and there are some good tips with how to check device time zone from a few different posts: https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Troubleshooting/Appointments-saving-as-wrong-time-zone/m-p/17229#...

I think this will point you in the right direction, but let us know if you have any other questions! 

[DaoDeJing]

Thanks for the link. It gave me the answer! By looking at the customer's information, they are indeed shown as having a different time zone than me.

So, the problem was that they had set up their iPad with the wrong time zone (or had moved to a new time zone without changing the iPad's settings to match).

Unfortunately this is rather alarming, because there apparently isn't a way for the customer to realize there is a problem if they are relying on just the one device to tell them the time. One would have thought that the device would use location management to correct itself to the right time zone, but perhaps the customer had disabled those options.

It seems the only way to protect against this problem in the future is to carefully look at each confirmation email I receive for a new booking. If there is a greyed-out "client time zone" listed, then I will need to contact the customer to confirm what time they intended to sign up for.

An extra step and thing to worry about, but apparently not much can be done about it. Gotta protect the customers from themselves sometimes I guess. 😛