Staff Panel Settings
The Staff panel is the page of your Client Scheduler where clients can choose the person they are scheduling their appointment with.
If you have the Staff panel included in your booking flows, you can make edits to the elements of the Staff panel by going to Settings > Staff > Staff Panel Settings.
The Staff Panel Settings allow you to make the following customizations:
Change the name of the panel: By default this just reads as "Staff" but you can change it to be "Therapists" if you are a Massage Therapy practice or "Photographer" if you are a photography studio, etc.
Turn on the "No Preference" option: This is great for businesses where clients don't particularly mind which staff they meet with for any particular service.
Allow Book Staff In Order: Making this selection will make it so that when clients are going to book appointments the appointments will get assigned to staff based on their sort order. The staff who is first in your list will get first priority for appointments and so on down your list of staff.
Randomize Staff: Allows you to display the staff listed on the Staff panel in a different and randomized order each time a clients progresses through your scheduler. This helps to ensure that all staff get an equal chance of appear at the top of the list if you allow your clients to choose between multiple staff options.
Add a No Staff Error Message: This error message show if clients go to book an appointment and no staff are available to book with once they reach the Staff panel in the scheduling flow.
Add some text to the header of the panel: This gives you room to explain a little bit to clients around the staff panel
The default panel settings shown in the image above creates a nice but generic look to your staff panel when clients are booking:
Let's say you make a few changes to your Staff Panel Settings so that the Panel Title now reads "Consultants" (1) and you have turned on the "No Preference" option (2) and added a bit of explainer text to the top of the screen (3):
After saving your changes in the Staff Panel Settings window, here's how those changes would appear on the client facing scheduler:
Within your Staff Panel Settings you can choose to show or hide the "No Preference" option on your staff panel of your client-facing scheduler. If you choose to show it, then when clients are going through to make an appointment they will have the option to choose "No Preference" as they are selecting which staff to book with:
This is a great option if you have a business where some clients prefer to meet with specific members of your staff and others don't have a preference of which staff they meet with. If a client chooses that they have "No Preference" on which staff to book with, then they will see appointment times for all of the staff that offer the service that they are booking.
If a client selects an appointment time that only Staff Member A has available, then the appointment will be assigned to Staff Member A. If the client selects and appointment time and both Staff Member A and Staff Member B have availability during that appointment time, then the appointment will be randomly assigned to one of the two staff members.
When multiple staff people are available for an appointment time slot then the no preference option assigns appointments completely at random. There is no weighting put on which staff gets appointment priority when the client chooses no preference.
This may be obvious, but I think it's worth noting that this feature is not beneficial if you only have one staff person on your account. If you only have one staff person than the appointments will always be assigned to that one staff person. Again, fairly obvious but worth a mention.
You can turn on the No Preference option by going to Settings → Staff and clicking the button for "Staff Panel Settings":
From the Staff Panel Settings window that appears, change the No Preference dropdown from "Hide 'No Preference' Option" to "Show 'No Preference' Option" and then press the button to "Save Changes":