Collaborative Services Add-on

Bookly Collaborative Services (Add-on) allows the creation of services that require the simultaneous involvement of multiple staff members or a staff member and shared resources essential for service delivery. With this feature your customers can schedule appointments with two or more staff members working collaboratively. Moreover, you gain the capability to create and oversee various shared resources, such as rooms, tables, equipment, specific tools, and devices. This ensures efficient management and prevents double bookings of resources already in use.

Setup and configuration

1. Purchase, download, install and activate Bookly Collaborative Services (Add-on) in Plugins.

2. Before setting up collaborative services, ensure you have created the simple services that will compose them. These simple services can be configured as ‘Private’ if you prefer not to offer them individually to customers.

To create a collaborative service, click Add service, enter its title and select Collaborative. Click Create service.

3. When the service card opens, on the General tab, you’ll find a drop-down menu that enables you to add simple services and resources (see below how to create resources and add them to your collaborative services) into a single standard appointment.

4. In Settings > Collaborative services, you have the option to enable or disable customer selection of staff members during the booking process.

Equal duration

If you enable the Equal duration setting for a collaborative service, each simple service included in it will have a duration equal to the longest one among them. This ensures that all services and resources are reserved for the same duration, simplifying scheduling, particularly when resources are involved. If this setting is disabled, each simple service will retain its individual duration as defined in its settings.

How to create a resource and use it in a collaborative service

For example, you have a meeting room (a resource) and two employees are required to conduct consultations in that room. To prevent the possibility of double bookings for the meeting room when it is occupied, follow these steps:

1. In the Staff Members section, add a staff member named "Meeting room".

2. Create a simple service named "Room". If you don’t want customers to book this service separately, set its visibility to Private. Assign the staff member "Meeting room" to this service.

3. Create another service named "Consultation" with visibility set to Private. Assign two employees to this service.

4. Create a new collaborative service named "Consultation". Add the "Room" and "Consultation" services as simple services within this collaborative service.

Now, when a client creates a new booking through the front end, both your staff member and the meeting room will be reserved. This will be clearly reflected in the Bookly Calendar.

When the next client attempts to book a "Consultation", the system will only show available time slots when the meeting room is free.

Collaborative services are marked with a relevant icon in the list of services.

When a client books a collaborative service, both your Bookly Calendar and the Appointments section will display separate appointments for each service involved in that booking.

To identify if an appointment is part of a collaborative service, simply click on it.

You can also click on the indicator to view the list of services that the collaborative service consists of.

In our blog, we've described more scenarios about adding resources to bookings.

If your collaborative service consists of two or more services assigned to multiple staff members, customers cannot individually select staff members for each part of the collaborative service. Instead, the system permits the selection of an employee only for the initial service (provided the Do not allow to select a specific staff member option is disabled in Settings > Collaborative services) within the complex appointment, with other employees being assigned automatically.

How to schedule one appointment for several employees

To schedule an appointment involving multiple employees simultaneously, follow these steps:

1. Create a single simple service. Assign this service to all staff members involved in the appointment.
2. Create a new service of Collaborative type. Add the existing simple service as many times as the number of employees required for the booking.

For instance, if your collaborative service involves two simple services, then two staff members will be booked for such appointments. Similarly, if you add three simple services to this collaborative service, then three employees will be booked for such appointments simultaneously.

Clients will receive a single notification for the booked service, while staff members will receive notifications for each booked appointment.

Collaborative services can only be booked via the front end. Administrators cannot create appointments with collaborative services in the backend but can manually add each appointment as a part of the collaborative service.

Try this demo to get a better understanding of how the Collaborative Services (Add-on) works.

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RELATED

Compound Services (Add-on) – combine existing services with spare time to build one complex appointment.

GOOD TO KNOW

[BOOKLY BLOG] How to use resources in bookings

[BOOKLY BLOG] What’s the difference between Compound Services (Add-on) & Collaborative Services (Add-on)