Welcome to the appointment economy - a new world driven by dedicated time slots and engagement from a distance. Your customers, prospects, and staff are expecting pre-booked services at convenient times using digital channels. Good thing you have Coconut.
Lobby TV is launching this month to help share wait times and lobby info in physical branches, and we’ve done lots of tidying up:
Option to disable callback request form after-hours
Choose whether Service or Location is first to be shown in Modern Client View
Display merchant terms in Reserve with Google
and more!
We’re ramping up some thought leadership pieces we hope will bring you additional insights about the appointment economy. Check out the webinars and blog posts.
Thanks to those of you who already responded to our survey - if you haven’t yet, click here to spend 3 minutes and help us evolve Coconut.
Stay safe and put on your sunscreen - it’s steamy out.
- Your Coconut Team
P.S. If you missed what we released in May, click here to have a look.
New Features and Capabilities
Lobby TV has launched! Whoohoo!
Lobby TV shows your visitors where they are in line for both pre-booked appointments and walk-ins. This simple visibility for wait times across the branch means that your staff don’t have to answer the same question again and again - “how long until my turn?”
Callback request form can now be disabled when the location hours are closed
This is a new setting for admins to enable which allows you to disable access to the callback request form when the location is closed - helpful because callback requests should be handled in a timely fashion
If this setting is turned off, clients could add themselves for a callback in off-hours, potentially requiring them to wait until the location opens next
Admins can now choose for either Service or Location to be shown as the first step in the Modern Client View
Please note: if you offer more than one meeting method for a service ( for example “Visit us in person”, “Phone Call”, or “Video Call”) you may not currently require Clients to select a location for that service.
We now show merchant terms in Reserve with Google
In the Client View Settings there is a section for Compliance Information. If anything is entered in the “Additional Information” field we will send this information along with the “Terms of Service URL” to Reserve with Google to be displayed during the booking process.
If you choose to leave the “additional information” field blank, we won’t send anything to Google
Et voila, translations can now be entered for Location names
Product Improvements:
We listened to early feedback from the Schedule Redesign and made some improvements to how events show up on the redesigned schedule. Thank you to those that shared your thoughts and ideas, you’re helping us evolve better and faster:
Events are now the same width as they are on the existing schedule
Appointment status is now shown by colour rather than icon
Filter menu has been updated to reflect the move from status icon to status colour
Appointments with no staff assigned now use a white background to better communicate this state
Client name is now the first item on an appointment
Meeting method icons are now on the right side of the appointment to allow for more appointment details to be shown on small screens
When on the day view, “No Staff Assigned” is now a viewable option so you can to easily see which staff is available to take an appointment
Updated our messaging surrounding the ability to go back to the existing schedule during the pilot if desired. We’d be interested to understand why you want to revert back! Please use the “SEND FEEDBACK” button on the Redesigned Schedule to send us your thoughts.
Modern Client View
The redundant summary step in the Modern Client View was removed and instead added the ability to book appointments directly from the Client Details step. Compliance information will now be shown on this step.
We added some more accessibility functionality, such as more title attributes.
Improvements to the Service setting “Don’t cancel appointment if attendee(s) cancel”
If left unchecked and even one attendee cancels, then the appointment gets cancelled
Now, if you check this setting, we won’t cancel if attendee(s) cancel unless it is the last attendee who cancels. If everyone cancels, we do cancel the appointment. This improvement will prevent appointments from getting to a state where the appointment exists with 0 attendees. Much tidier.
Added support for an In Progress appointment to be set to No Show in the Staff Dashboard
Bug Fixes:
Improved the re-login prompt when a user’s session as expired to correctly catch across all pages in Coconut
Callback service phone number field no longer accepts spaces
Resolved an issue which caused the language switcher for Callback Service to not work on Internet Explorer
Resolved an issue that caused walk-ins to not be able to be returned to Lobby
Some providers thought we were spammy when we used link shorteners for URLs in SMS messages - we promise we aren’t! This change will help increase deliverability of notifications.
Fixed an issue where feedback ratings of 0 were not exporting correctly in Reports
Fixed an issue on the Schedule Page where the date picker did not reset after being closed and reopened
Fixed an issue that could cause buttons on the Modern Client View to overlap in Internet Explorer
Fixed an issue that could make it difficult to edit upcoming appointments in the Contact Center
Fixed an issue where in certain circumstances a booking shortcut would not display all the available services for a staff member.