We use appointmentcore for scheduling and those appointment are placed on my Infusionsoft calendar. On occasion a client will book multiple appointments with us, when only one is required, thus holding time on our calendar unnecessarily.
I’ve talked with appointmentcore about preventing double bookings based off a clients Infusionsoft record and unfortunately it is a problem that they do not have a solution for.
I am curious if there would be an infusionsoft driven solution to search for multiple appointments on the Infusionsoft calendar assigned to the same user. Extra points if that search can be automated and run weekly!
The problem comes in when you have to define what a double booking means to someone (which it won’t mean the same thing to every business). Same email address and exact same date and time and duration? Same IP address for anything on the same day? Do you allow multiple contacts to share email addresses and therefor must use some other method for identifying them? Do you wish to limit how close together appointments are scheduled on the same contact (by email or id?) and define that as a duplicate appointment? Not as straight forward, logistically, as it may seem I’m afraid.
Joanna - if the duplicate bookings are being made by the same contact, then create a new tag for this purpose (apply this new tag within the campaign, not AC). Set a decision diamond as soon as the appointment is created to look for that tag, if it isn’t present, apply it. If it IS present, fire off a task for someone on your team to take a look at the record or contact the person to see which one they want to keep or even send them an email to let them know that they can only have one active appointment at a time. This won’t prevent them, but it will allow you to easily find them.
Yes, this makes sense and is ultimately what I would like to do, if preventing them is not an option. I’d like to search for duplicate appointments, apply a tag if one is found, have a team member look into the double booking. Thank you!
The duplicate bookings are being made by the same contact.
My question is how to search for the duplicate bookings to apply the tag to the contact record.
This method won’t find duplicate appointments that have already been created, but will allow you to search for future appointments as the come in.
To start, all of your current valid bookings would need to have this tag already applied (I don’t know how many you have), but once they have it, the campaign will look for new appointments coming in to see if the tag has already been applied. If it hasn’t, it would apply it and do nothing else. If the tag already exists, the campaign sequence would alert a member of your team.
If there is the possibility of contacts scheduling another appointment after this one is completed - and that is permissible, then you’ll need to remove that tag once it’s over, so that the flagging won’t interfere. This will all depend on if you’re going to allow subsequent appointments or not.