You can specify that certain employees cannot be booked online by new customers. This relieves popular employees from regular customers and gives, for example, new team members the opportunity to get more appointments.
Prerequisites for the new customer lock
- You allow online booking only with login.
- Your customers must log in, before they are shown the available employees and free appointments.
- There is only one initial status.
- Regular customers have a different status than the initial status.
1. Check online booking mode:
Under Settings > Online Booking, the option "Registration mode / Allow booking of appointments without login" must be disabled:
2. Check registration mode
Under Settings > Online Booking > Basic Settings > Registration, the option "Also show available times, then request login" must be disabled:
3. Check initial status
Under Settings > Customer Settings > Customer Status, there is only one status which has the attribute "Initial Status". New customers automatically receive this status. All customers with this status can no longer book the team member blocked for new customers.
If there are multiple or no statuses with this attribute, you can correct this by clicking on the status and enabling the option "New customers automatically receive this status" only in the desired new customer status.
4. Check regular customers
To ensure that regular customers can continue to book the team member blocked for new customers, please check your customer records. All customers who have the customer status marked with "Initial Status" can no longer book the person blocked for new customers!
Setting up the lock for a team member
To prevent new customers from booking online with a specific team member, go to Settings > Employees, open the employee profile, and enable the option "Block booking from new customers" in the "Online Booking" tab.
From now on, only customers who have a customer status without the "Initial Status" attribute can book with this person.
Further information
Communicate the lock transparently
Especially if you work alone and want to block bookings from new customers, we recommend indicating on the booking page that no appointments are currently available for new customers. This way you communicate transparently why certain people cannot find any free appointments. More on this topic: Online Booking: Texts
Define exceptions
If there are individual services that should still be bookable by new customers despite the new customer lock, you can set this in the service. To do this, open the desired service and enable the option "Ignore new customer lock for employees for this service" in the "Online Booking" tab.
This makes sense if, for example, the owner generally does not want to be available for new customers, but can still provide individual consultation services to them.
Troubleshooting
If regular customers complain that they cannot select a specific person for booking, please go through the prerequisites listed above.