If you don’t use Online Booking in order to control the clients you see or to better control your schedule, you might be missing out on new clients looking for Pros they can book online! With PocketSuite, it’s easy to offer initial consultations or discovery calls online while preventing anyone from booking your other services online.
Setting up Online Booking for consultations
PocketSuite makes it easy to control what services can be booked online. To get started, make sure that all of the services, classes, reservations, packages, subscriptions, or other items you do not want clients to purchase online have Show Online toggled off.
Next, make sure Online Booking is turned on under Settings > Features. Once turned on, you can customize your Online Booking site, including adding a description and images, by heading to Settings > Online Booking. Read more about that setup in our main Online Booking article.
At this point, you will have a booking site but nothing can be booked as all your services and other items have Show Online turned off. To create your initial consultation, head to Settings > Services > ‘+’ > Create a service.
You can choose the name of your service, such as Initial Consultation or Discovery Call. We recommend setting the price to $0, but you can charge for your consultation if desired. If you’d like, you can make the duration as little as 10 minutes to ensure you still maintain control over your schedule. If you want to further control your schedule, you can set a custom availability. For example, if your typical hours are Monday - Friday all day, you can set this particular service to only be available on Monday afternoons to protect the rest of your time for paying clients. You can also use Lead Time to prevent last minute bookings if desired. Be sure that Show Online is turned on for this.
Scrolling down to the Location setting, if you plan to offer your consultation as a phone or video call, set this to No Location. You can connect a video conference directly to the service if desired. Checkout our Suite Center article on PocketSuite and Zoom video conferencing.
Now you’re all set to be booked for your initial consultation! You can share your booking link on your website, social media, or through Google Leads to start bringing in new clients!
If you sell any products we recommend also setting those to Show Online so new clients can purchase them online. Using our Product Orders feature, you can offer pickup and delivery of products sold through PocketSuite directly to your clients through your dedicated Products site (which is linked to your booking site). Read our Suite Center article on Product Orders to learn more.
Pro Tip: If you don't want your cancellation policy to apply to your free initial consultation, head to Settings > Scheduling and set "Require credit card" to "Only if priced." Note that if this is set to "Always require," clients will still be required to add a credit card even if your cancellation policy is a percentage of total, which for a free service would always be $0.