Chapter 08
Booking without a phone call
An online calendar is not a receptionist. It is a set of rules written in advance, and it will follow them exactly.
08.1What actually changed
For most of the history of small practices, booking was a conversation. Someone described a need, someone else translated it into a slot, and the translation was invisible. When booking moved online, that translation had to be written down as rules, and a lot of practices discovered they had never articulated it.
That is the real work of adopting online booking, and it happens before anything is switched on. Which appointment types exist, how long each takes, who can be booked for what, how far ahead, and what is not bookable this way at all.
08.2Rules are answered literally
A person at the desk applies judgement to an odd request. A booking rule does not. If the rules permit a combination the practice would never have agreed to on the phone, that combination will eventually be booked, at the least convenient possible time.
The corrective is to start narrow. Offer the appointment types that are genuinely routine, keep everything else behind a conversation, and widen only when the pattern of what people try to book is known.
08.3The new desk work
Online booking removes a category of call and adds a category of supervision. Someone has to check what came in overnight, catch the bookings that are in the wrong slot type, and contact the people who booked twenty minutes for something that needs an hour.
This work is smaller than the calls it replaced, but it is not zero, and it is easy to leave unassigned because it did not exist last year. It belongs on the same protected run as the rest of the desk's uninterrupted work.
08.4Two front doors
For a long transitional period a practice has two booking channels and one diary. The failure mode is a slot that appears available in one place and is taken in the other. Whatever the arrangement, there must be exactly one calendar that is authoritative, and everything else must read from it.
The second failure mode is quieter: the phone route slowly becomes second class, and the people who rely on it — often the ones with the least straightforward needs — get the worse experience. Keeping the phone route genuinely usable is a deliberate decision, not a default.
08.5Measuring the change honestly
The claim usually made for online booking is that it reduces missed appointments and desk load. Sometimes it does. It also lengthens the booking horizon, because a calendar that is open is a calendar people book far ahead, and a longer horizon works in the opposite direction.
A practice that counts its own miss rate before and after, by appointment type, will know which effect dominated in its own case. Nobody else's figure is a substitute for that.