Can we please have a way to either specify an appointment duration (which is NOT the same duration as the booking time slot) or hide the appointment duration?
My booking time slots are two hours long, but they need to account for drive time to the next appointment, and the type of service. Some appointment durations are only 30 or 60 minutes, but YCBM always shows the duration at two hours because that’s the duration of the time slot. That’s misleading and confusing for clients.
I asked for this by email to support in July 2020.
The grid display is set with the increment you choose, so if you have a 2 hour timeslots then we can only display time with that increment. We hope to have an updated booking grid in the future that will hopefully allow for this level of complexity. It will be a bit of time before this is updated and I can’t guarantee that this change will be possible once that happens.
@LeroySchulz The new infrastructure changes we will be implementing over the next 6 months will need to be accomplished before looking at something like this. But again since we haven’t had too many folks looking for this, it may not be something we will implement.
With that said when you hide the duration, you would still need to specify the start time. Would that be enough for your workflow, essentially allowing the customer to choose when the start time would be?
With that said when you hide the duration, you would still need to specify the start time. Would that be enough for your workflow, essentially allowing the customer to choose when the start time would be?
Yes, hiding the duration would be enough for now, though it would be better to be able to specify a duration as well.
As it is, my booking slots are two hours apart to account for both the appointment duration as well as an averaged drive time to get to the next appointment. (All of my appointments are in the field.)
Currently, the YCBM system makes it appear that an appointment is two hours in duration, which in reality is never more than 60-75 minutes. That has a cascading effect in that for each appointment, multiple people (my clients, plus my client’s customers) are given a wrong expectation.
Ideally, for each type of booking I could specify a duration. But lacking that, at least being able to hide the duration would be better than the status quo.
@LeroySchulz thanks for the initial details. I had a call with another customer that is asking for this same thing. Both hiding the duration and a way to have admin overrides. Meaning the customer sees one time to book, but in the back end it accounts for drive time and other things into account.
I’m not looking for something complicated, like YCBM having to account for GPS locations. (It seems beyond the scope of what YCBM should offer.) In my usage case, even something simple like this would be useful:
Specify duration of booking slots. (YCBM does this.)
Specify duration for each type of service, regardless of the booking slot duration. (YCBM doesn’t do this.)
Show the service duration instead of the booking slot duration. (YCBM doesn’t do this.) That way I can communicate to clients an accurate expectation of how long my work takes.
Have the option to hide the duration instead. (YCBM doesn’t do this.)
Hi Ben, have those infrastructure changes been implemented now? Can we start to see some of these feature suggestions that I’ve made over the last couple of years be implemented?
HI @LeroySchulz we are testing things in small batches with some of our free users. We are very close (not definitive time) to opening this up to more folks. We also have been discussing the '23 roadmap and I will work to get this flexibility scoped out and on the list.
Hi Ben, will this ability EVER be implemented? It’s been over four years that this has been a pain point for us and our clients and seems like a key feature that should have been there from the start. I can see from other forum posts that we aren’t the only ones asking for this.
It would be really helpful to have the option to customize or hide the appointment duration, as it can cause confusion for clients when the time slot doesn’t match the actual service time. This flexibility would make scheduling more accurate and user-friendly. Hope this feature gets added soon!
I wouldn’t hold my breath that this will be implemented – soon or ever, apparently. I’ve been asking for this feature for 4.5 years now.
It seems that it would be a very basic function to give us users control over what appointment duration is shown to our customers, but the team at YCBM seem to think otherwise.
Thank you for your feedback, and we sincerely apologize for the delay in our response. I will pass this information along to our product team to see if there are any plans to implement this feature in the near future. This is a feature that would improve the booker experience and provide greater accuracy.
For updates on this and other developments, keep an eye on our product updates page. Alternatively, if you’re subscribed to our marketing emails, you’ll receive notifications once your feature becomes part of our tool.
