Scheduling an appointment for a customer is done by accessing their account within your Customer Service section. You can search for the customer using any of the search fields at the top of the screen, including name, address, or email address. Once you have located the account, you can schedule an appointment in one of two ways.
The first way is to select the three dots menu on the far right-hand side of the customer’s account row.
You can also select the customer’s name to access their customer account and schedule the appointment from within the customer’s address card.
Click the Schedule button within the proper address card to begin the process.
Equipment information on the customer’s account, if applicable, will be found in the top section including any warranty program information.
A Lead Type and Lead Source are able to be entered here for this specific appointment, but are not required. Lead Types that are currently used on any appointments are available for reuse by selecting them from the dropdown, or you can add a new one. Lead Source will be typed into that specific field. If you wanted to use both fields, you might have Employee Referral as your Lead Type and your employee’s name as the Lead Source.
Note: These fields are available for tracking within the Opportunities report in your Reports section.
The Service Category, or the reason why the customer is scheduling the appointment, will be selected from the next dropdown. These Service Categories are set up in your specific departments and will determine which technicians and subsequent availability are presented below. Please see our article on Service Categories for more detail about how to setup new Services and for some helpful sample services for your industry.
In the technician dropdown, you will see a list of technicians that have the selected Service Category as a part of their capabilities. You can select a technician if you would like a specific technician to be assigned to this job (known in Sera as "pinning"), or you can leave the option as Auto Assign if you would like the scheduler to find the best slot for this job within your work day. You can override this list of technicians by selecting the checkbox next to Include All Technicians.
Note: you can alter the technician's capabilities within their Tech profile, found under the department, or by clicking the technician’s name on your Dispatch board.
The schedule below will present the times that are available. If Auto Assign is selected, the schedule will show any appointment blocks where there is one technician available who has a matching capability to your Service Category for this appointment. If a specific technician has been selected, you will only see their specific availability. As you select a date from the calendar on the left, the available blocks are presented on the right. As a user of the admin portal, you will see both green and yellow time slots. Green indicates that the time is available. Yellow indicates that the time is not available, but you would be permitted to book this appointment to potentially re-arrange the schedule to allow for the appointment to be worked.
You can use the box below the schedule to add any specific appointment notes that you might want available to the technician, i.e. issues that the customer is describing or instructions on pets or other hazards that might be encountered while at the job site.
Selecting the Save button will bring you to the created job screen with the appointment now available in a Pending status.
