Bookings
Capturing appointment requests with enough detail that your team can confirm them without a second phone call.
Before you start
- The list of services you take bookings for
- Your availability rules, including anything you never book (bank holidays, staff-specific slots)
- A decision on whether SIMCOAI confirms bookings or only captures them
What a booking record contains
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Service | Matched against the services you configured, not free text guessed by the AI |
| Requested time | Including alternatives if the caller offered them |
| Contact details | Name, number, and email where given |
| Notes | Anything the caller said that matters - access, accessibility, a specific staff member |
| Verification state | Whether the customer was confirmed |
| Transcript | The full exchange |
Captured versus confirmed
These are different things and the distinction matters to your customers.
| Mode | Behaviour | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Capture only | The request is recorded; your team confirms | Most businesses, and anywhere double-booking is costly |
| Confirm where enabled | SIMCOAI can confirm against your availability rules, subject to your account configuration | High-volume, simple booking patterns |
Assigning a person and setting their hours
In Bookings → Staff, add each person and their working hours, then turn on Use staff scheduling for bookings and save. The Add Mon–Fri hours button provides an editable 9am to 5pm starting point. The AI assigns an available person automatically when a caller does not ask for anyone. If the caller asks for someone by name, that person must be free for the selected time; each service can turn off Ask by name. A person’s day off and part-time hours remove them from those slots.
Turn staff scheduling off to hide staff choices and use your shared booking capacity. Existing staff and hours remain saved for when you turn it on again. A slot is offered in staff mode only when at least one active person covers it. The timetable’s capacity limit still applies.
Getting availability right
SIMCOAI computes availability from your actual configured timetable before the AI ever mentions a time - it does not let the model guess or estimate a slot, so what a caller hears matches what your diary really has free. If your services take different amounts of time to complete, a caller who has not yet said which service they want is asked to name it before being offered specific times, rather than being quoted availability worked out for the wrong service and then told that time is unavailable once they clarify.
- Keep opening hours current - seasonal closures are the most common source of wrong bookings
- State services precisely; "consultation" and "follow-up consultation" are different things to a customer
- Configure what must never be booked automatically
- If your services vary in length, keeping each one's duration accurate is what lets a caller be asked which service they want before hearing times for it
How times and dates are spoken
The AI speaks times and dates in words on a call - "half past three", "the twenty-first of August" - rather than reading out digits, because that is how the reading is actually understood over a phone line. Dates and times shown in the dashboard remain in the normal written format.
Cancelling or moving an appointment
Cancelling a booking and moving it to a different time are recognised as two different requests, and both are recognised as distinct from making a brand new booking. A caller asking to move an appointment is never told it was cancelled, and a caller asking to cancel is never told a new booking was created instead. If a caller partway through changing a booking says something like "actually, never mind", that plain decline is honoured immediately rather than carrying on with the change from an earlier turn in the call.
See also
- Phone profiles - give bookings their own line and greeting
- After hours - what happens to booking requests overnight
- Verification codes - protecting changes to existing bookings