What are custom booking questions?

Custom booking questions allow you to ask the customer more questions during booking so you have the information you need to complete the job. The benefits are:

  • Time savings – you don’t need to enter data from emails into the system as the customer will enter it directly
  • Data validation – you can set answer types so the customer provides the right information up front reducing the need for back and forth questions
  • Convenience – the customer can easily answer each question you have in clear sections instead of having to try and answer lengthy questions via email.
  • Conversion rates – collect only the data you need for providing the quote to encourage enquiries and collect the full job data you need only when the customer needs to provide it

Adjusting standard booking questions and Creating custom booking questions

There are four standard questions that appear on the booking portal that you can set if they should appear or not. Depending on plan you can also create custom questions that the customer can answer during the booking process. For customers not booking via the portal you can still manually enter this information on your side.

 

Step 1: Edit the standard questions 

  • Next to each of the questions you can press the Active button to set the question to Inactive. This will remove the question from the customer booking process for all job types.
  • Alternatively, you can hide questions by job type using the “survey type” filter. Select which job types the question should and shouldn’t show for and then press the “Save” button.

Changes here will apply to new and existing jobs when customers go to book. 

Step 2: Create/edit custom booking questions

  • In the custom booking questions section press “Add section”
  • Set the section name (this is used in the customer portal)
  • You can then add questions setting the answer type, if the question is required or not and more.
  • After saving a new question to the right of the table, press the Inactive button to activate the question so it appears on the customer portal.
  • Conditional questions can only be set for questions where the answer was a dropdown selection.
  • You can create multiple sections and questions.
  • The layout, wording and questions set how it appears in the customer portal.

Changes created here will only take affect on new quote/job records created AFTER the new fields and layouts were saved. Existing records will remain unchanged. This is to prevent data loss on existing job/quote records if sections or fields were deleted from the settings. 

Set where the custom fields should appear on your job record

By default, any questions created will appear in a section on your job timeline called “Additional details”. However, you can set your own layout using the “Custom timeline fields” settings. This allows you to create new sections similar to the customer portal or to add fields to existing sections where you have other internal only data it is relevant to.

 

Navigate to Settings > Survey settings > Custom fields > Custom timeline fields.

  • Press Add Section to create a new section on the job record (or use an existing section you have created before)
  • Press Add Row to create a new row in an existing section. Set if it should be 1, 2 or 3 columns. You can then select which fields appear in which columns.
  • Conditional questions will automatically appear after the main question selected (you don’t need to select them)
  • If you add a field to the wrong section, save the changes. You can then click on that field again and use the deselect option in the dropdown to remove it.

 

Changes will only take affect on new quote/job records created AFTER the new fields and layouts were saved. Existing records will remain unchanged. This is to prevent data loss on existing job/quote records if sections or fields were deleted from the settings. 

How does it display in the customer portal

The sections and questions appear exactly as you’ve set them on the booking portal. The wording used in the custom booking questions settings is what customer will see. Customers do not see custom timeline fields you have created – these are internal only. The customer will only see custom booking questions you have set up.

If you turn off all the standard questions and set no custom questions, the customer moves straight to the confirm details page and skips the additional information page entirely.