How to set up your availability (working hours) in appointment bot?

Appointment bots help your clients’ book appointments as per your availability. These chatbots allow you to set up your availability in the calendar, informing your clients about your working hours and letting them make the appointments accordingly.

Let us checkout how you can do that.

Once you are done creating an appointment bot, you’ll notice a new section added in the left navigation panel i.e. Appointments

In this section you’ll be able to see all your appointments. You can set your working hours and configure your appointment schedule accordingly.

How to set your working hours?

Step 1

Click on Appointments and select “Working Hours”. Here you can see the default working hours

Step 2

To set up your working days in the calendar, you just need to use enable or disable the toggle button present next to each day and add the timings. For example, if you don’t work on “Wednesday”, you can disable it by turning off the toggle placed next to it. This ensures that users won’t be able to book appointments on any Wednesday

You can save the changes by clicking on the “Save” button present at the top right side of “Working hours” section

Step 3

If you want to add breaks to your working hours, you can click on plus icon present next to each day and add the timings.For example if you wish to add a break of one hour in the Monday’s schedule, you need to set your availability on “Monday” from “09:00 to 13:00” and “14:00 to 17:00”
To add breaks, first thing that you need to do is, change the time to “09:00 to 13:00” by clicking on end time and selecting “13” from the dropdown

After you have updated the end time, you need to click on plus icon to add the time interval of “14:00 to 17:00” by selecting it from the dropdown menus

Click on “Save” to save the changes

Note:

• Each day that is enabled will show one time interval before you make any changes.
• You can delete an additional time interval window for each day by clicking on trash icon and then on “Save” button to save the changes.

Step 4

To change your appointment duration, go to “Configuration” section and open select duration dropdown.
You’ll see four options i.e. 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes. You can select any one option to change appointment duration, which is otherwise set to 15 minutes by default.

Step 5

In case you want to change buffer time that is present between two time slots, you need to open “Select buffer time between appointments” dropdown and select your preferred timing.

After you have selected the desired buffer time click on “Save” to save the changes.

Step 6

If you want to change the default time format and use a different one, open dropdown menu next to ‘Select Time Format’ and select the preferred option. Click on ‘Save’ to save the changes.

Note: The schedule window works 15 days in advance from the current date. Users can book appointments only within the next 15 days. As one day passes, the next day gets enabled.

Now that you know how you can make the desired changes to your appointment bot. Let us know how is it useful for your business?

An appointment bot can be used on various business websites including websites for hospitals, schools, real-estate businesses, beauty & fashion outlets, media companies, and many more.

Users can book appointments online and look forward to making a visit. For example, if you own a beauty salon, your clients can book appointments as per your availability and come down later. This saves time and efforts of both the parties.

You can also use chatbots to send notifications to the users in case of any changes in the schedule. This keeps them engaged, makes them confident about your service, and helps them realize that they are important to you.

Use Appy Pie’s Chatbot Builder to create an appointment chatbot for your business and serve your users in a better way!