Handle booking requests and intake questions for a service business

Service businesses such as salons, clinics' front desks, tutors, cleaners and repair shops get booking requests by phone, text, web form and DM at all hours. Each one needs the same questions answered before it can be scheduled, so staff play phone tag, leads go cold, and appointments get booked with missing details.

The agent answers new booking requests on your website chat, contact form, text line or social inbox. It asks your standard intake questions (service needed, location, preferred times, anything you must know before the visit), checks your booking calendar for open slots that fit the service length, and offers a few options. When the customer picks one, it either books it directly, for simple appointment types you have approved, or holds it and sends the request to staff to confirm. It sends a confirmation with what to bring or prepare, and passes the full intake summary to whoever does the job. Anything outside your normal services, an urgent issue, or a question about price exceptions goes to a person.

1. List your bookable services with duration, price range, service area and required intake questions
2. Connect the agent to your scheduling tool so it can read availability, and decide which appointment types it may book without approval
3. Connect the channels customers already use: website chat or form, text line, and social inbox
4. Write the handoff rules: urgent issues, complaints, out-of-area requests and custom quotes go to staff
5. Run it with staff confirming every booking for the first couple of weeks
6. Review dropped conversations and no-shows each week and adjust the questions

• Calendly or Acuity Scheduling
• Square Appointments
• Google Calendar + Zapier + an LLM
• n8n + an LLM
• Tidio or Intercom

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Make one of these tools? Feature your tool on every playbook where it is already listed.

Staff confirm bookings for any appointment type not on the approved list, and handle cancellations with fees, refunds and urgent situations. In medical or other regulated settings, a person reviews intake answers and the agent never gives clinical advice.

Double bookings happen if the agent and staff both edit the calendar without a sync, so use one source of truth. Customers must be told they are talking to an automated assistant where required and given a way to reach a person. Intake answers can contain sensitive data, so collect only what the job needs and store it in your normal systems. Texting customers is regulated in many places; only message people who contacted you or opted in.

Measure response time to new requests, the share of requests that end in a booking, no-show rate and staff time spent scheduling, before and after. The value is fewer lost leads after hours and complete intake details before every appointment.