Set up booking: every option in the wizard, a video course for administrators

The words of the video, in order. Use the chapter list above to watch a part instead.

Chapter 1. What your customers will get

Goal: See the booking journey your customers get, from the first question to the confirmation.

Welcome to course two A of the Kav Studio Academy. In this course you will set up booking, and meet every option in the wizard. First, see what your customers will get.

Here is an example: a fictional massage and physiotherapy studio, with the Kav assistant on its website. None of it is Kav's own offering.

A customer opens the assistant, and says they would like to book a massage.

The assistant opens a booking form. The customer chooses a service, each with its name and description, and then a day. Days with no free time are struck out.

Next come the times. They step by the length of the service plus its break, and they are in the business's own time zone. The customer adds a name.

Then an email address, an optional phone number, and a reminder choice, which stays at No here.

Before anything is sent, a review lists every answer.

The customer sends it, and a six digit code arrives by email. Nothing is booked until the code is entered.

The code goes in, and the appointment is confirmed. Everything you just saw is what you will build in this course, one wizard question at a time.

Chapter 2. Before you start

Goal: Know what to prepare, and where the wizard lives in the Studio.

Before you open the wizard, prepare three things. Everything else is optional.

First, a department. On the Solutions page, the card for Services and treatments lists What you need first: Department, Ready, and Calendar account, Needs setup. The calendar is optional.

The department matters, because its opening hours frame every booking. This one is Sales, in the New York time zone, open on weekdays from nine to five. If a department is open around the clock, every service will need hours of its own.

Second, if you want bookings copied into your own calendar, a Google account you can sign in to. Without one, customers still get an emailed invite.

Third, your list of services: a name, and a length in minutes, for each.

Choose Set up. The page has three steps: Questions, Review and Install. Nothing is written to your account until the last one.

A collapsed block, What this solution sets up, lists the pieces the template creates, before you answer anything.

Chapter 3. Part 1: Where bookings go

Goal: Choose the department, and decide whether to link a Google calendar.

Part 1 is Where bookings go. The four parts are tabs at the top of the form, and a counter shows how many of the twelve questions are answered.

The first question is required: which department takes the appointments? The list shows your desk's departments. Its opening hours decide when appointments can be booked, and its time zone comes with it.

Questions have an information button, with a fuller explanation. This one says that a service with no hours of its own follows the department's hours.

Next, the optional calendar account. Confirmed appointments are copied to the account's calendar. You can skip this: customers then get an emailed invite only.

The default is Do not link an account. Skipping is fine. You can connect an account later, and apply the solution again.

To link a calendar, choose Connect another Google account. You are taken to Google to approve access.

Google asks which account to use. In this recording it is the organization's own account, so its details are blurred.

Then Google asks for your approval. Kav asks to see your list of calendars, to see when you are free or busy, and to create, change and delete events on calendars you own. Kav never sees your password.

Google sends you back to Kav. In this build you land on the Connected accounts page, where the new account is saved.

Back in the wizard, the account is now an option, with the date it was connected.

Choose it, and a third question appears: the calendar that confirmed appointments are copied to. Only calendars that events can be added to are shown, and the wizard says how many it hides because the account can only read them.

Here a dedicated demo calendar is chosen, so bookings stay apart from everything else.

If you skip the account, nothing is lost. The review will say: no calendar linked, customers get an emailed invite only.

Chapter 4. Part 2: Your services

Goal: Fill in every field of a service card, and manage several services.

Part 2 is the heart of the template: your services. Each service is a card, and you can have from one up to twenty. The three services here are examples for a fictional studio. Use your own.

Choose Add, and a card opens. The first field is the name, as customers see it, from two to a hundred characters. Use your customers' own words. Renaming a service later creates a new one, and switches the old one off.

Next, the length of the service in minutes, from five to four hundred and eighty. The system uses it to find free times, and the assistant never states a length of its own.

How many customers at the same time? The default is one. Raise it for a class, or a shared resource.

Break after each booking, from zero to two hundred and forty minutes. Slot starts step by the length plus the break, so sixty minutes with a ten minute break offers a time every seventy minutes.

Minimum notice defaults to two hundred and forty minutes, which is four hours. And how many days ahead can be booked runs from one to forty-five, with a default of thirty.

Treat this service as health information is a switch. When it is on, the service gets the strictest data class, and the calendar entry and the email subject say only Appointment.

A short description, up to eighty characters, appears after the name on the booking form. Keep prices out of it.

Duplicate copies a card and adds the word copy to its name. Here the copy becomes a physiotherapy session, forty-five minutes, with shorter notice, and the health switch on.

A third card, a group class, with room for eight customers at the same time.

Collapse a card to see its summary: the name, the minutes, and the hours. A counter in the footer tells you how many things still need fixing before you can continue.

Chapter 5. Hours per service

Goal: Give a service its own days and hours, and understand how they combine with the department's.

Every service can have its own days and hours. This section is optional, and it sits at the bottom of each card.

Left empty, the service follows the department's opening hours. But if the department is open around the clock, every service needs hours of its own, or no times will be offered.

When both exist, they combine. A customer can book a service only when its own hours and the department's hours are both open, so a service can never reach beyond the department.

On the physiotherapy card, Quick hours does the typing for you. Sunday to Thursday, nine to five, fills five rows in one click, and says so underneath. The other quick option is every day, nine to five.

Each row has a day, a From time, and an Until time, in twenty-four hour format. Until may be as late as twenty-four hundred, and a range cannot cross midnight.

A lunch break is simply two rows for the same day. Here Sunday now ends at one o'clock, and a new row opens it again from two until five.

Add a day adds a row, up to twenty-one in all. Remove drops one.

A card with no hours of its own also offers Copy hours from, which copies the hours of another service in one step.

Now a mistake, on purpose. On the class, I type an Until time that is earlier than the From time. The wizard accepts it. The server checks that every range closes after it opens, and that ranges do not overlap, when you reach Review.

Chapter 6. Part 3: How bookings look

Goal: Set the business name and address, choose what stays private, and read the live preview.

Part 3 is how bookings look. All six questions are optional.

Business name for the emails, up to a hundred and twenty characters. It appears in the header of the booking emails, and in the calendar entry. Watch the preview: the name appears there too.

The address, up to two hundred characters, plain text. It becomes the location on the customer's invitation, and on your own calendar entry.

Now four switches. All of them are off by default, and each one applies to every service.

Show the service name on the business calendar only matters for services you marked as health information. Those appear as just Appointment, unless you turn this on.

Keep the customer's name off the calendar entry. By default the entry reads the service, a dash, and the customer's name. With this on, the name is left out.

Keep the customer's email and phone off the calendar entry removes the contact lines from the entry's description.

Leave the Studio link out of the calendar entry. By default the entry carries a link to the booking in the Studio, for signed-in staff. Switch this on when people outside your staff can see the calendar.

On the right is the live preview, What your customers will experience. It shows the first six service names with their minutes, a confirmation card where the time is only an example, and your calendar entry, following the switches. It ignores the Studio link switch, and it does not show the day picker.

Chapter 7. Part 4: What the assistant says

Goal: Add your own booking wordings, block the wrong ones, and write a scoping note.

Part 4 is what the assistant says. There are three questions, and only the last one is required.

Extra wordings that mean book: one per line, up to six hundred characters. Wordings such as book an appointment are already built in, in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English, so add only your own trade words.

Wordings that must not start a booking, also one per line. Cancelling and rescheduling are already excluded.

The scoping note is required: one short sentence, up to three hundred characters, with a live counter. It says what the tool is for, and what it is not.

It can only narrow the tool, never widen it. Angle brackets are refused, and so is a line that starts with a platform label such as USE WHEN. The wizard lists the problems right under the field.

No code fences, no control or zero-width characters, and no tool names either; tool names are checked on the server. Here is a good note, and the counter shows eighty-seven of three hundred.

When all four parts are complete, the last button changes to Next: review.

Chapter 8. Review: what will change

Goal: Read the server's plan, fix a warning and a blocked item, and know what each action means.

Next: review asks the server for the full plan, the same plan the install would run. It is a preview. Nothing is written.

The items are grouped by the service that will handle them. Assistant, routing and forms holds the module, the visitor forms, the assistant's access to the service, the routing rule and your note. Appointments has one appointment type per service. Connections is the Kav appointments service itself.

Every row has an action. Create will be added. Update changes something you installed before. Already present means it exists and matches. Edited by hand means someone changed the row: it is shown as a difference, and never overwritten. Switch off retires a row. Blocked cannot be installed, and Not planned is left alone.

Here the Appointments group has one Blocked row, with the reason beside it: the booking hours are not valid. This is the mistake from chapter five, on the group class. The server checks that each range closes after it opens, and that ranges on one day do not overlap.

At the top, the plan says no calendar is linked, so customers get an emailed invite only, and that the licence is included.

Routing checks list sample sentences in four languages, with the capability and routing rule each should reach, and a state: Passed, Failed or Not run. All eleven passed. A check that was not run is no evidence that routing works.

Go back to the questions, and fix the hours on the class.

Review again. Every row says Create, nothing is blocked, and Next: install is ready.

Chapter 9. Install and the result

Goal: Install, read the result table, and know the next steps.

The last step is Install. The install is sent and runs in the background, and the table refreshes every few seconds.

Choose Install this solution.

Thirteen items report back. Some are Applied at once. The assistant's four capability bindings say Needs your attention: the connector instance could not be verified, check it, then apply again. The overall status says Needs your attention too.

Installing is safe to repeat. Choose Apply again with these answers. What exists is now Already present, the four bindings are Applied, and the status reads Installed.

Below, What to do next offers three steps: Try it in the widget, Connect your calendar, and See bookings.

That is every option in the wizard. In course 2B, we look at what your customers experience: the emails, the calendar entry, and managing bookings afterwards.