Online Booking Comes to G&O Family Cyclery
You can now book, reschedule, and cancel sales and service appointments online!
We are thrilled to share that you can now book both sales and service appointments online! As part of our continuous and ongoing improvement project, we have in the past couple months introduced a soft rollout of our new online booking tool. We’re pretty excited about it and want to share with you how to use it, as well as a little bit about our motivations and how we got here.
How we got here
The pandemic upended our service calendar and rather than try to go back to the way we used to book service, we decided to take this as an opportunity to adopt a better system. We have decided – at least for the foreseeable future with the pandemic and the supply chain issues – to remain nearly entirely appointment-only, and focus on making the appointment system easier for everyone.
We set out to make scheduling more transparent and fair and to empower customers to make their own appointments. We also have been working hard to improve our inventory on hand in order to make turnaround time shorter and more predictable once your bike is in the shop. At the same time as we work to make our schedule more predictable, we need also to be able to pivot and help you with your bike emergencies! It’s been a fun puzzle to tease out and we think online booking is a step in the right direction for these goals!
Summary of new features
Our new tool allows us to offer new features including:
Self-book: you select from the available dates without back-and-forth over the phone or email with us, and reschedule as you need to, all online
Diversify appointment types: Not all appointments take an equal amount of work and do not need to be scheduled for the same duration. We are now breaking our service scheduling into several calendars based on job type. While we wish the lead time to get in for routine maintenance was shorter, it is more equitable and efficient for planned maintenance to be scheduled months ahead, while still leaving room for transportation emergencies to get in within a matter of days to weeks.
Submit requests with appointments: Because the supply chain is so fragile right now, it has been extremely helpful to collect information about special requests at the time of booking. It can take weeks to months to get some parts, and it is very helpful when we can work on getting a hold of them well in advance of when your bicycle arrives at the scheduled date.
Automated reminders: no more forgotten appointments because it slipped your calendar, or because we forgot to send a reminder.
Introducing Booxi
After an interim period of nearly a year of frantically using email and a tool called “YouCanBookMe” to arrange our scheduling, we have now opened an online scheduling tool with the platform Booxi. There is a one-stop booking page hosted on their website and additionally, the scheduling links are embedded in our website when looking to test ride or looking at the service menu.
Booxi allows us to operate several calendars to manage different sorts of appointments
For sales, we have a Test Ride calendar and a New Bike Day calendar. For each of those visits, we value how appointments have allowed us to offer the rider one-on-one time with potential bikes to test ride, and then after ordering, for having orientation with their new bike. We continue to offer walk-in hours Monday-Wednesday 11am-5pm for parts, accessories, and general sales questions, but we believe that sales appointments have improved everyone’s experience in those more in-depth conversations.
For service, we used to just run one calendar for appointments. When a job that takes 20 minutes gets scheduled the same way as a job that takes most of the day, this leads to a wildly varying daily workload. This sort of gambling in our schedule that hopefully some of the projects would be small ended up increasing the lead time for all projects, and made squeezing in last minute, urgent projects nearly impossible.
With our new scheduling system, we have retained our general Regular Service (large, and largely routine projects like tune ups and overhauls) calendar, and added separate calendars for scheduling the 60-day Free Tune and a third A La Carte, for scheduling smaller jobs, both emergency and non-emergency e-bike service, as well as kids bike services. Keeping three different calendars allows us to better plan our schedule, manage our daily workload, and accommodate smaller jobs more fairly.
How to Book Service
Basically, to request an appointment, you:
Select what kind of appointment you need
Fill out the survey about your bike and needs
Select your date and time of the open appointments
Fill out your contact info and automated reminder preferences
Review the details, accept Booxi’s terms, and submit
We then review your request and either accept or reach out for more information. Booxi will send you a confirmation once your request is accepted, and an automated reminder a couple days before.
A preview of the process and a couple more tips
Select your appointment type
If you navigate through Booxi’s page, each appointment will show a popup of more information. If you click the green buttons through the service menu on our website, it skips that page, but there is a separate button corresponding to each menu item to take you to the right place.
Fill out the survey
This is important to us being confident we will be able to address your bicycle’s needs and be best prepared to be able to begin as soon as it arrives. This is required, and feel free to leave any extra notes you have; we are manually reading those, so we’ll follow up by email if we need to clarify.
Select the date and time
You may have to tab forward to future months to see available appointments. The days highlighted with a white background reflect days we have appointments available. Grayed out text indicates that all appointments on that day are already taken, whereas bold text indicates that appointments are open on that day.
The days highlighted with a white background reflect days we have appointments available. Grayed out text indicates that all appointments on that day are already taken, whereas bold text indicates that appointments are open on that day. Image on the right shows color-coded interpretations of these differences.
Input contact information
Please input the best information for us to reach you with questions and updates. But if the bicycle was purchased or previously serviced under a different name, it can be helpful to note that in the notes so that we can have clear records! For example, if we already have the make, model, and serial of the bicycle on file, it can be easier to verify what the correct replacement parts needed will be.
SET A REMINDER
We recommend selecting an automated reminder for your appointment. It will send you a message a few days before your appointment to confirm the date and time, as well as the details of what to expect when dropping off.
How to Book Sales
Booking a sales appointment follows the same five step process as for service: select the appointment type, answer the survey, select the date and time, input your contact information, then confirm.
Test Ride appointments are for taking test rides on some of the bicycles we have in the shop available specifically for that purpose. We ask for the questionnaire to be filled out so that we can make sure we have bikes ready for demo that would suit your needs and otherwise be prepared for your visit.
New Bike Day appointments are for orientation with new bikes that were awaiting assembly – the service team will send you an email with the link to schedule the appointment when your bicycle is fully assembled.
A work in progress
This scheduling tool and process are a work in progress for us. We will be assessing our capacity and aim to open up more appointments per week in the future. We are also working on the communication and clarity in the system, so we welcome feedback about the tool for us to work on, or to pass along to booxi.
So far, we have discovered some holes in the tool that include:
Lack of customizability: This tool is not as customizable as we would like: we cannot change the drop off window to be more than an hour, and we cannot make the calendar show before answering the survey questions.
Lack of readability: as with the customizability issue, the calendar display is only in grayscale, which poses accessibility and readability issues, and we are not able to customise it.
Lingering reliance on email follow-up: We are finding we need some back and forth about sourcing the right components, getting photos of damage, and arranging for service loaners, so bear with us about exchanging emails with you.
We are working to see if we can improve any of these, but in the meantime, do not hesitate to call or email and we can still help you get scheduled!
Some Closing Tips
Book early: Our Regular Service appointments are still generally 2-3 months out, but you can choose to book an appointment even farther out if you desire.You can always reschedule the appointment without penalty if you find you didn’t ride as much as you hoped to during the winter.
Check back for more appointments: The appointments are opening on a rolling basis, so there will be new appointments in the future every day. Also, if someone cancels or reschedules, that appointment automatically opens back up again.
Utilise the emergency appointment option: Even if you are unsure if you are having an emergency, if you would like an appointment to get it checked out, please do so. Our goal is to keep everyone out on the road, so if it's keeping you from riding your bike, we consider it an emergency.
Feel free to drop off early: If the only appointments available do not work for your schedule because of the drop off date and time, you are welcome to drop off your bicycle days prior to your scheduled service. We may not be able to look at it early, but we are happy to store it for you until the right day.
If you are unsure, contact us: We are still happy to field questions via phone, email, or walkin hours. We may not be able to fix your issue then, but we are happy to answer questions and help make a plan.
Happy riding!