Tekmetric Online Booking Settings

WHAT IS IT?

Tekmetric Online Booking is an easy to use online scheduling solution designed to make it easy to capture new customers, drive repeat business from existing customers, and enhance your customer's experience by allowing them to book service appointments directly with you on your website, via marketing outreach on your social media presence. 

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

Online booking improves your customer experience, enhances shop efficiency and lets you stand out as a leader in the industry.

1. Improved customer experience: Allow your customers to book appointments when and how they want. 
2. Enhanced shop efficiency: Spend less time booking appointments and more time with your customers. Customize your availability to match your shop capacity, specialized services and more.
3. Stand out in a crowded market: Enable enhanced features such as automated reminders, Book Online with Google, and other advanced features to stand out and make it easy for customers to do business with you.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

In Tekmetric, you'll set up your online booking to match how you run your shop. By customizing your availability, what services you offer and other settings, you'll quickly get up and running with a live booking solution. After setup, you'll install the widget on your website or add the link to your social media profiles to start automatically receiving appointments from your customers.  

You'll find the setup and settings within the 'Marketing' section of Tekmetric.

General Preferences

Edit your online booking widget image

By default we show a stock image of a technician working on a car. But you can customize the image that your customers see on the online booking widget to be whatever you want! 

To add a custom image click "Choose file to upload" button and select a file from your computer. Images must be a PNG, JPEG, or JPG file and cannot be larger than 3.2mb. Remember to click save in the top right corner of the page to apply your custom image. If you would like to revert to the default image, click the 'x' icon next to your uploaded image to go back to the default image provided by Tekmetric. 

Vehicle Settings

Vehicle settings allow you to choose which years and makes of vehicles you want to service. Click the Edit button to enter the settings modal. Choose a year, and click the checkbox to enable makes customizations. Enter the makes customizations modal, choose which makes you do or do not want to allow, and click Save! 

If you choose to allow all makes, leave the checkbox unchecked. 

Existing customers with vehicles that no longer adhere to your year or make restrictions will still be able to make appointments with their vehicles. Only new vehicles will be restricted using the settings, whether they are for an existing customer or a new customer. 

Send email when an appointment is created or abandoned

Choose which employees in your shop receive an email to alert them of new appointments made online. 

Selected employees will also receive an email when a customer begins the online booking process, enters their phone number, but does not complete the appointment.
This allows your team to identify potential customers who shared their contact information but didn’t finish booking—giving you the opportunity to follow up and win their business.

Colors & Labels

Use the drop downs to select the color and label to be used for waiter or drop off appointments. Alternatively, you can use a single color for both types of appointments to help visually indicate that the appointment has come from online booking. 

Availability

The availability section allows you to set the days of the week your shop is open, the hours you want to take appointments, and your daily and slot limits for each day of the week.

It’s important to note that the hours listed here do not need to be the same as your business hours. If you want to limit customers from not booking appointments too close to when you close, back off the ‘End time’ by 30 mins or an hour. If you only want to take appointments in the morning, you can control that here as well.

Multi-service appointments will block time for the longest service added to the appointment, not the sum of the duration of all the services added. 

Daily Limit - Allows you to set maximum number of appointments per day.  Online Booking will take into account appointments booked within Tekmetric when applying this limit.

Slot Limit - Allows you to set a limit on how many appointments can be booked per calendar slot. Online Booking will take into account appointments booked within Tekmetric when applying this limit.

Appointment Duration

This setting determines the default length of an appointment. This is similar to the Default Appointment Duration set in the ‘Appointment>Daily Schedule’ settings within Tekmetric.

After an appointment is made you’ll still be able to customize the length of an appointment based on the work the customer has requested.

Available Options: 30 minutes / 60 minutes

Minimum Notice

This option provides a buffer for appointments booked online. Customers are not able to book an appointment in less than the time chosen here.

You will likely adjust this option over time to maximize your capacity, flow, and availability.

Available Options: 1 hour / 4 hours / 24 hours / 48 hours / 72 hours

Note: This setting only takes into account calendar hours. For example, if the setting chosen is 1 hour or 4 hours, customers would be able to book same-day appointments.

Appointment Options

Allow after hours drop-off

When toggled ‘on’, an after hours drop-off option will appear for customers when they try to book an appointment at the shop.

Use the ‘Edit Message’ button to provide details to your customers about your drop-off policies, such as when and where they should leave their keys, park their car, etc. If no custom message is provided, we will default to display “Please call our shop to learn about our drop-off policies”

Within Tekmetric, after hours drop-off appointments will be booked as All day appointments on your calendar with a start time of 12:00AM. This is a placeholder allowing you the flexibility of moving them into your calendar as you need, it does not reflect an actual arrival time or appointment start time.

• If you are using Tekmetric Appointment Confirmation and Appointment Reminder Automations, when using the Appointment Date & Time personalization, Tekmetric will display only the date for after-hours appointments. All other appointment types continue to display both the date and the time.
• If your Automation message template uses the Appointment Time personalization on its own, after-hours appointments will display 12:00 AM. To avoid confusing your customers, use the Appointment Date & Time.

Allow courtesy transportation request

When toggled ‘on’, a ‘Request courtesy transportation’ option will be visible to the customer during the appointment creation process. Within Tekmetric, the appointment will be marked as ‘Loaner’ in ‘Ride Options’

Use the ‘Edit Message’ button to provide details to your customers about your courtesy transportation policies. If no custom message is provided, we will default to display “Please call our shop to learn about our courtesy transportation policies”

Waiter Appointments

You'll want to add specific limits around waiter appointments depending on your waiting room capacity. Think of the waiter slot limit as how many people fit in your waiting room. Separately, the daily waiter limit is more general and applies to how many you can handle in a day.

You can add up to 3 separate hours slots for waiter appointments.

The times will default to the earliest and latest of any daily availability, to capture as much time as possible. Shops can then reduce the amount of times they take waiters by changing the Start and End times in this section

Services

Show declined jobs

When toggled ‘on’ this setting will show the 3 most recently declined jobs to the customer when they are booking their appointment, and will show jobs up to 18 months old. If a customer chooses a recommended service when booking, you’ll see the job on the appointment in Tekmetric and the job will automatically be added to the RO as well.

To get the most value from this option, be sure to regularly review your declined services reports within Tekmetric. Make sure the ‘Job Title’ is clear and relevant, so that when the customer sees the title while booking they have a clear understanding of the recommendation. Only jobs marked as ‘Marketable’ will be shown to customers.

Customizing Services

Within the Services section, you choose which services are shown to a customer, and customize settings and availability for each service. 

Customization Notes

To edit each service click on the pencil button in the Actions column. To delete a service click on the trash can button . Ensure that you've saved changes before navigating away.

Icon: We have 26 different icons to choose from. This icon will be visible on the app that a customer sees.

Service Name: The main name of the service offered. Limited to 30 characters, this should be short and easy for a customer to read and understand.

Description: This should be a basic description of the service, to expand on the name. Limited to 50 characters.

Daily Limit: This is the daily limit for that specific job.

Slot Limit: This is the slot limit for that specific job.

Duration: By default all of your services will follow the appointment duration (30 / 60 minutes) that you set at the beginning of your online booking settings. You can input a custom service duration to block your calendar per service.

By increasing a service duration, this will impact your daily and slot limits. Longer service duration will result in fewer cars being able to be serviced, whereas shorter service duration will result in more cars able to be serviced. This may also impact your car count accordingly. 

Allow Waiter: If checked, the job will allow a customer to choose ‘Wait at the shop’ when making an appointment when this service is selected.

Custom Availability: By default, each service will use the same availability that you set above in the Availability section. By toggling on this setting, you can set specific days of the week and hours of the day to restrict when customers can book this service online. 

• To add another time window: Click on the More Actions menu button and click "Add another time window". For example, Oil Changes can be booked on Mondays from 9AM - 12PM, and 1PM - 4PM.
• To copy the same time window settings to every day of the week: Click on the More Actions menu button  and click "Copy window to all days". 
• To make a day of the week unavailable: Click on the More Actions menu button  and click "Remove this time window". For example, Oil Changes cannot be booked on Fridays. 

Note: Time windows for each service must fall within your online booking availability. For example, if you've set your online booking availability for Monday to 10AM - 4PM, then your time windows for an Oil Change must be within these hours.

Add Service: This will create a new line for a new service. Note, there is a limit of 10 services that can be added.

As a general principle, it's better to pick limits below your capacity and raise them later. For example, if you only have one alignment rack then setting your limit daily limit to 1 can protect your schedule

Frequently Asked Questions - FAQ