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  Public Ticket #3668085
Fixing booking of online services in parallell to physical
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  • Erik Harry Høydal started the conversation

    Hi, we run several hearing clinics. We also offer video consultations and this service is obviously not tied to a physical location and it's important that people can book the first available audiologist and not have to choose a physical location. 

    The problem is that when we create a "clinic" called "Online Video Consultation" - and add employees, all the services offered at their physical clinic is added to the Online service.
    This means that our online service has all the physical services added as well. And people suddenly book these mistakenly and gets annoyed. 

    SUGGESTED SOLUTION: Enable which services are available at a given clinic.

    This way we can simply allow Video Consultation only for this "Clinic" and people will not be confused.  Video consultations are a very common thing these days and you really need to fix this. 

    Half a year ago, you said that a temporary solution was to create a "fake double audiologist", but this is an extremely manual method that requires for us to keep two lists and manually update the other every time one gets a booking.

     Plus the employees need to update and check both lists at all time. An online booking typically comes 10 minutes before the appointment and so you need an extra person to monitor this constantly for it to work. 

    Please modernize this as soon as you can. In advance, big thank you! 

  •  1,821
    Miloš replied


    Hi Erik,

    The logic in Amelia, when it comes to this specific use-case, is still the same as colleague Marko explained on your old ticket here : https://tmsplugins.ticksy.com/ticket/3547824/.


    I will just do my best to add some useful details which can help to clarify these possible current workaround solutions.

    The main point, all the services which will be offered depend directly from the Employee/provider's allocated working hours. This has not changed.

    There can be several ways to work around this, it is not only to create duplicate Employees, but we will go through them again.


    1. If the online services should not be offered in the same time/parallel time slots:

    For example, let's say if one/same Employee would be assigned to both Video Consultation service and Physicall Service - and if he/she would be available for the online Video consultations only from 9 AM until 11 AM - and then after that, to be available only for physical appointments in a clinic for the remainder of the shift.

    In that case, we have an easy solution, you would just go in the Employee's Work Schedule and edit the available working times.

    Set him/her to be available for "Online Service" from 9 AM until 11 AM ( only for Service A),  then you can set up a break if needed, etc;

    and add available work times from, let's say 12 PM (Only for Service B) until the end of their shift.

    2807465180.png


    This way, there won't be 'double booking' of both services in the same time, etc.


    2. In regards to the other workaround with duplicate Employees, if both services should be available/offered in the same times;

    you don't have to manually update the duplicate of Employee B every time the duplicate A gets a booking.

    Instead, as colleague Marko advised, you can use our Google/or Outlook Calendar integration and have them both synchonized to the same Calendar while enabling to 'sync Busy time slots' to Amelia.

    So, if you assign Employee duplicate A to only provide "online consultation" and Duplicate B to only provide "physical appointments", it can work if they are connected to same Calendar.

    This way, the busy times are going to be automatically synchronized between them, so if Employee Duplicate A gets booked, for example for an Online Consultation from 10 Am until 12 PM - then the Employee duplicate B will also become busy in this time period for their Physical Service.


    There is an additional workaround for creating duplicate Employees - they can actually have exactly the same name and Email - so the notifications for booking will be received to the same Email to make it easier for each Employee to follow their bookings.

    Basically, if you use Google or Outlook for emails, you can put the same email,

    just place " +number"  before the @ symbol,   and you will be able to save employees,

     but all emails will go to the same email address.

     For example:   ' [email protected]',  '  [email protected]',  ' [email protected]  ' etc, 

    will be different while saving and you will be able to save all employees but all emails will go to the ' [email protected]'  address.

    Here is an example from my "fake employees", this one I named "Nick Employee", and his duplicate I just added the name "duplicate", but they can actually have exactly the same name ( if needed).

    I just added the +1  before the @ symbol.

    1378017810.png
    7202478469.png


    And of course, they will also see all this on their connected Calendar.

    Please check more how to connect Employee to Google Calendar here;

    And for Outlook Calendar here;


    So with this automated synchonization with busy slots across the same Calendar and Amelia;

    there won't be a need for an additional person to monitor all that and the busy time slots will be automatically handled.


    At the moment, we don't have a better workaround, but let me know if you have any additional questions about this.


    If you wish to see this changed in the future, you can add a development idea, but we can't promise if or when that will be changed.

    Please feel free to search through our feature suggestion page

     to see if someone may have already suggested this feature. If you can't see it, feel free to add your suggestion there, and as more people vote, the feature will move higher on the priority list.

    You can certainly follow our changeLog page if you'd like, where we state any changes/new features/bug fixes during updates;

    and our newsletter, so you're informed about new features, bug fixes, freebies, etc.




    Kind Regards, 

    Miloš Jovanović
    [email protected]

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