Service windows are used when you want to give your engineer a specific time to arrive on-site, but you don't want to inform the customer of this.
Most clients would use this to cover themselves if the engineer is late to the appointment. If you find you use a lot of am, pm, or all-day events, the diary can become very crowded. Service windows will help to split out the events and make them more organised within the diary view.
- You can change how your diary times show when you send communications to the customer. This means, for example, that a service window you have entitled 'Morning 9am - 12pm' could simply be shown to the customer to say 'Morning slot'.
- As another example, if your service window is between 8-11am and it is called 'Morning', you can then select a slot at 9-10am and it will appear as 9-10am in the diary and engineer communications.
- However, when sent to the customer as an email/SMS they will see the diary event information as 'Morning'. Select whether you want AM/PM and all-day events to be taken into account when they are added into the diary.
In order to set up your service windows, go to your system settings and select 'Service window' from the 'General settings'.
Once here, you will be able to drag your cursor to define your actual service windows. Once you've defined a time slot, you can name the service window (as well as giving it a title to present your customers with).
Service window tagging:
In order to have the service window displayed to your customers (as opposed to a specific time), go back to your system settings. Under 'Jobs', find the 'Customer job confirmation'.
- This will allow you to edit the outgoing message a customer receives upon a job having been booked. You can use tagging to enter the 'diary_service_window' tag.
- This will auto-populate when sent to the customer with the appropriate service window.