We are building a Tutoring site. When people are booking Package, they can select the Employee on the first appointment. But when they book appointments after the first appointment, it does not give the option to either stay with the same Employee, or at least select an Employee. It just gives you available times for ALL Employees, so you could end up with a different Employee for each appointment.

Our clients will typically want to stay with the same Employee throughout all appointments in the package.

When booking additional appointments, there should be a step to either select Employee you want, or by default, you should only be shown the availability of the same Employee you used in your previous appointment.

Thank you for the reply. I will look at the Customize section.
I had not seen that option, but it sounds like that could be the solution.

Best,
Hank

Looks like only the 1.0 booking form has the option to remove "Any Employee", but even then the field is blank, and it still lets you continue to book an appointment with Any Employee.

Can it be set to be required to select an employee before moving forward?

You can take a look here:

https://lwttutoring.wpengine.com/find-a-tutor/book-a-tutor/

Hello Aleksandar,

Can you please look into my other ticket about the Placeholders for Custom Fields not working in Notifications? We have a site that's launching soon, and that feature is critical.

Thank you!

Hank

Hi Aleksandar,

Yes, Milos solved our other issue, thank you!

Now, back to this thread.

We’re using the BuddyBoss Integration, so one method of booking will be through that interface. When you’re viewing a member Profile, you can book that employee, which works well. 
The problem is when booking subsequent appointments in a Package from the Customer Panel, it does not automatically stay with the same employee you started with in appointment 1. It simply gives you a calendar that includes ALL employees, not just the employee you started with. Nor any option to select any specific employee at all.

So, when you say "However, if a customer selects an employee manually, this employee will be assigned to all upcoming appointments within a package.” This does not seem be to be the case with the BuddyBoss booking method.

We would expect that an employee-specific booking interface would operate in the same way that selecting an employee does using the general booking interface, but that does not appear to be the case.

We’re thinking that the selection of an Employee via the drop-down in a regular booking widget might capture or store that data in a different way (that’s not happening with the BuddyBoss integration). Not sure if it’s a bug, or was just not included.

Can you point us where we might go to modify that?

This is an urgent matter, so your prompt response would be much appreciated!

Thank you,

Hank

Also, we are willing to PAY you to get this done, if that helps motivate you, and can bump us up in the queue.

Thanks,

Hank

Unfortunately, even if you select an Employee in the first appointment in a package, it does not stay with that Employee in future appointments.

There are many businesses where customers will want to stay with the same employee throughout the services in their packages. At a minimum, there should be a drop-down to select the Employee you want when booking your future appointments. Currently, it gives access to all the Employees, so there's no way to know who you'll get.

This is a major issue for us, and we were not expecting this feature to be overlooked. But we're in too deep now. 

Hope this is addressed in an update soon.

Thanks,
Hank

Hello Uros,

This is also a major issue for us. I created a separate private ticket on this matter. (PRIVATE TICKET #3093028)

I agree with Hank: "There are many businesses where customers will want to stay with the same employee throughout the services in their packages. At a minimum, there should be a drop-down to select the Employee you want when booking your future appointments. Currently, it gives access to all the Employees, so there's no way to know who you'll get."

Best would be to add an option in the customizer for packages, that would force clients to choose an employee for packages. (option: Make it mandatory to choose a specific employee for packages).

Because of the nature of tutoring businesses that sells services in packages, this option would be an essential feature.

We really hope this will be addressed soon.

Kind Regards

Sandor

Yes, I hope this issue is addressed very soon. It's critical for many businesses, particularly Tutoring, where you will likely want to retain the same tutor through several sessions..

We were able to custom develop a workaround to get what we needed, but the Amelia code base is very abstracted and is NOT designed to be extended, which makes customization much more time consuming than it should be.

We will keep an eye out for the updates. 

Thank you,
Hank

Hello there,

This issue still has not been resolved.

The highlighted case is not true what Aleksandar wrote.

If a customer books a package, chooses a specific teacher on the booking form 2.0 for his first appointments, the selected employee won't be automatically assigned to the upcoming package.. This is still a major issue for us. We thought that this is taken care of by now, but this still has been overlooked.

This is what they see in the customer panel, when they want to book the remaining appointments:

Because of the nature of tutoring business, normally an employee has to be kept throughout the entire package. We are not allowing the customer to change the tutor during their package duration.

I have run more tests, if the provided service within a package has more employee assigned to it, then on the customer panel the customer will have the option to select another employee currently.

What we would expect to see on the customer panel is something similiar to this:

We appreciate the fact that you would probably still keep the old use case, allowing the cusomer to select different employess withtin a package. But there has to be a way to make it optional for us, Amelia managers to set it probably on a service level in the admin that for this service we don't want to allow cross movement between employees if this service is bought in a package. Something like that.

Hope this makes sense.

Kind Regards

Sandor

Hello Uroš,

Just for reference, I created a feature suggestion, just to make sure that it gets more exposure to users.

It is about adding the option to keep same employee throughout the entire package if an employee was selected during the initial booking or preselected via Shortcode.

https://features.wpamelia.com/1787

Please anyone who needs this feature, upvote it, so that might help it to kickstart this sooner.

Thanks!

Sandor