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We’re excited to announce a new feature that enhances your client intake process: the ability to book appointments directly through your custom intake forms. This update is now live on the Smokeball platform, and it’s designed to save you and your clients valuable time. 

What is it?

You can now add an Appointment component to your custom intake forms, allowing clients to schedule appointments with specific staff members at pre-designated times. This feature not only helps prevent double bookings but also ensures that all scheduled appointments sync seamlessly with your staff members' Smokeball calendars for easy tracking. 

 

Why does it matter?

Time is one of your most valuable resources, and even the simple act of scheduling an appointment can be time-consuming. With this new feature, both you and your clients can quickly and easily find a mutually convenient time, reducing the back-and-forth typically involved in scheduling. 

 

How does it work?

Integrating the Appointment component into your custom intake form is simple. When building or modifying a custom intake form, just drag and drop the Appointment component into place.
 

 

Here’s some of the things you can do with the component: 

  • Select staff members clients can book to see 
  • Set the booking duration 
  • Set a ‘buffer time’ before and after the meetings 
  • Set a minimum notice period so clients can’t book meetings with less than the set time 
  • Select days and hours available for booking 
  • Set the time zone 
  • Select the type of meeting (in person or telephone) 

 

Once a client books an appointment, it automatically syncs to your Smokeball calendar, making it easy to keep track of your schedule. 

Who gets it?

The Appointment component is available to firms using LeadPro or MatterFlow add-ons, or with Prosper. 

Start using this feature today to enhance your client intake process and make scheduling more efficient for everyone involved. 

@adeleh @Sara Sultan 

This is a great step towards allowing leads to book initial appointments. In looking at this feature there is some additional work that needs to be done in order to implement it as a useful solution for scheduling client appointments:

  1. In intake forms create an “All Matter Types” option to select all matter types to apply to the intake form. This will allow creation of an “Appointment - Existing Client” form which can be accessed in all matter types. As it is, there are too many matter types to reasonably select them all to apply to the form.
  2. Allow law firm user to specify certain criteria when initially sending the form including, participants, days or blocks of time available for the meeting requested, buffer, how the meeting will take place, and how long the meeting should be.
  3. AND, OR] possibly Allow the client user to specify multiple times when they are available. Send those times to the person who sent the form for approval of a final time slot to be calendared.

Additionally, I am repeating myself on this but allow forms to be sent via SMS. Unfortunately, there will always be customers who will not “get with the program” and they have to be met using the technology they use.

@adeleh @Sara Sultan 

 

Can I also suggest that there is a way to determine which weeks or days the law firm user is available? For example I want to offer all Tuesday mornings for appointments, except I will be out of the office for the second Tuesday in October. There is no way to pull that week out of the appointment availability. 

 

Also do we have the ability to send this form generally, or do we need to send it through each matter?

I experimented a bit with this feature. Looks like I need to mark my calendar events as “busy” to make the timeslots unavailable. 

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