Tentative Calendar Events
HOW HAS NO ONE ELSE THOUGH OF THIS ?!!?!?!
Hey guys, this is CRITICAL. I just realized how much we are failing by not having these features. We constantly have business appointments that are "flexible" and just need to be on the calendar so they can be "fit in" between appointment gaps.
EVERY enterprise/decent calendar program (Google/Exchange/365/OutOfOffice/etc) uses different "types" of events (busy/tentative/free), so why not RS?
We need appointments to have a type so we can know if appointments are tentative. Otherwise, we are risking losing appointments because of being "booked solid" when one of those may be okay with moving to another time. With tentative appointments alone, we will have a huge communication improvement between the booking tech and the repair tech.
This should be as easy as adding a selection drop-down inside of the appointments, and using the globally recognized visual-aid system of "solid block" vs "spriped block" vs "shaded block".
The genius! THE GENIUS!
-
Ryan (CTO, Pinellas Computers) commented
I would like to request that this topic be un-declined. It was not even left open for votes for a month, and this is still a problem without a solution. I believe my proposed solution is very reasonable and much better than nothing that we have now. At least leave it open for additional votes and comments.
-
George Harb commented
take a look at how work.fleetmatics.com handles job scheduling. They do a wonderful job with the entire scheduling workflow. Two key features they lacked that RS has are: two synch with Google Calendar (for tech private appointments) and two synch with quickbooks.
-
Ryan (CTO, Pinellas Computers) commented
Yes, but that doesn't exactly show visibly well when there is more than one concurrent appointment. As it stands, we can't even see anything when there are more than two appointments at once, even on a 23" LCD.
-
Couldn't you put the word tentative in the description until you finalize it?
(or maybe some other code like MA for movable or something)
-
Ryan (CTO, Pinellas Computers) commented
Hi Troy,
I really don't feel like 'apologizing to customers' (on a constant basis) is an acceptable solution to this feedback topic. I truly think a new option/feature is reasonable to fix a problem like this. RS is supposed to cover all aspects of the computer shop, including scheduling. Therefore, we shouldn't need to use third party calendars just because the RS calendar is inferior and doesn't have basic enterprise features.
We're constantly wanting to put things on the calendar for "when we have time", but there's no way to identify those compared to "must be done at this exact time". Therefore, we only have the ability to schedule appointments that require a specific date/time.
My idea is to have the equivalent of a "private" appointment. Like a private comment, the private appointment would be added to the calendar, but would not email the customer. Private appointments would be visibly different (diagonal stripes) from public/busy appointments (solid).
A tech should also be able to switch a private (tentative) appointment to public (busy). When that happens, the customer would get an email just like if it were any other public appointment.
I think these are very reasonable ideas that would completely solve issues that all repair shops have. What do you think?
-
The workaround is to put it on the calendar to lock in the job, then if the tech isn't available - you can apologize to the customer and move the job - if that feedback happens rather quickly then you were responsible enough to that customer imo
-
Ryan (CTO, Pinellas Computers) commented
They guys, we just had a huge fail because we weren't sure if we could do a job same day. We can't add the appointment to the calendar without getting confirmation from our on-site tech and they were not reachable. As such, the customer decided to find someone else because the best we could do is schedule them for the next day (until we heard back from the on-site tech).
If we could have added the appointment as tentative, we could have thrown it on same day, then when the on-site tech called back a half hour later he could have switched it to busy (solid), and then the customer would have gone with us. Worse case scenario, the appointment would have alerted us at the scheduled start time and we could have called and rescheduled.
What do you think?