Manage How Often Services Should Get Booked, Using Service Priority Groups
Good to know:
Service Priority Groups are part of our Core Product and available in our Enterprise plan.
Changes you make in this feature do not become active immediately but always at midnight.
A service allocation of up to 99% can be applied across any number of service priority groups.
ℹ️ The percentage defines how much time of the working time per week from all resources, as well as dependencies responsible for this service, shall be made available.
How this article is structured:
1. How Service Priority Groups Works - Giving an Example
To use the feature, you need to go to Settings > Booking in the menu. Click on the edit pen and scroll all the way down, there you will find Service Priority. Enable the feature by activating the toggle and you can start with the set-up!
Click on the button + Add Priority Group to create your first group.
In this example we will create our first group with three services which are the most valuable for our studio, 'Strength Building', 'Laser Therapy' and 'Shoe Shopping Slot'. We want 60% of all service availability and resource capacity to be assigned to these three services. We name this group 'Prioritised services' and we are done with the first group.
We are now creating a second group with two services for which we do not want to provide much booking time. We assign 10% to this group and name it 'Less focus on'.
ℹ️ Note the box appearing at the bottom in the screenshot above:
Our remaining service availability will be applied to all services which are not included in one of the two groups we created.
We are done with creating our Service Priority Groups and will move on to the settings!
2. Let Us Have a Look at the Settings
The settings are at the very end, right before the save button. You can activate three options, whereby the third is only available for selection after at least one of the first options has been activated.
1. Activate for calendar and Fast Booking Widget
You can activate this option if you want to be informed by the predefined availabilities of certain services.
ℹ️ Note that no booking will be blocked in the calendar even if the capacity for one service is already reached for this week.
2. Activate for the booking widget
Select this option if you want your predefined availabilities to take effect in the widget.
Mind that this means that once the time for the resources assigned to the service is reached, the service will no longer appear on the widget for your customer to book while you will be able to book it in the calendar.
3. Suspend service priority groups before the week ends
What happens if or when the service allocation for a priority group is met? Essentially, no further bookings can be made for that priority group, for the remainder of the service allocation week.
Remaining calendar availability can be filled with any other services you offer. However, what if there is still demand for your priority group - and you want to allow the priority services to be scheduled? To still get bookings for priority services, enable the setting, “suspend all priority groups prior to the target booking day”. This allows you any service to be booked in the 1-3 days leading up to the target booking day.
ℹ️ Activating this setting allows you to get bookings you may not otherwise have got, thus driving revenue and bolstering operational efficiency.
3. FAQ
Q. How many priority groups can l add?
You can add unlimited priority groups, up until you have allocated 99% of your service availability.
Q. What happens if l add multiple services to one priority group?
If a group contains multiple services, any combination of those services can be booked to reach the booking availability percentage; in theory, just one of the services could make up all of the bookings. If you want to reserve a service allocation for each, it’s best to add one priority group per service.
Q. What happens when this service allocation for a priority group is met?
No further booking slots will display in the Booking Widget; which. means customers can no longer schedule the service(s). When a user attempts to add a service to the calendar, a warning message will appear, explaining that the service allocation has been met. However, this is only a warning: the user may still add the service to the calendar.
Q. Can l suspend individual priority groups?
No, once you activate the setting “suspend priority groups prior to the target booking day”, all your priority groups will be suspended.
Q. What is the “target booking day”?
The day in a service allocation week that services can be booked.
Q. I got an error message telling me l can only allocate up to 99% of my booking availability to priority groups. Why 99%?
If you could assign 100% of your booking availability to priority groups, it would block services not allocated to a priority group from ever getting booked.
Q. Why do l get a message in the Fast Booking Widget & booking calendar form when l add a service that does not belong to a priority group, telling me how many hours booking availability remain for the service?
The services not in a priority group are in a "hidden" group with a leftover percentage.
Having this knowledge is helpful. Why? It indirectly informs you of how much service allocation has been taken up by priority groups. If few hours remain for a non-priority service, this tells you that few services have been booked for priority groups.
What’s more, this can help inform your decision to activate the “suspend all priority groups prior to the target booking day” setting. By doing so, you will ensure you don’t block non-priority services from being scheduled.