Setting up Your Client Portal

Set up your Client Portal to enable online bookings, manage appointments, and accept payments. Learn how to customize, verify clients, and more.

The Client Portal is a powerful tool you get included free with your Zanda account. The Client Portal allows your clients (both new and existing) to quickly view, book and manage existing appointments online, reducing your administration time. You can also enable the online credit card processing feature so that your clients can pay for their appointments at the time of booking.

Watch The How (And Why) To Use the Client Portal Webinar

To use your Client Portal you'll need to first activate it from within your Zanda account and set it up to work exactly as you'd like. This only takes a few minutes. Once this is done, you can place the special link to your Client Portal on your website and on your outgoing emails. You'll soon be getting new clients, bookings and payments 24/7 without doing a thing!  

In this article:

• Enabling the Client Portal
• Setting Up The Client Portal Notifications
• Customizing the Client Portal
• Verifying New Clients
• Nominating Available Services
• Nominating Available Times

Enabling the Client Portal

The first thing you'll want to do is edit the Portal URL name to something like your business name. By default, this is a randomized alphanumeric string to get you started. Next, enable the Client Portal. Here's how you can do this:

1. Go to Settings > Schedule > Client Portal.
2. Toggle Clients can manage their appointments to switch it on. 
3. Click Save.

Setting up Client Portal Notifications

You may want your clients to receive an email or SMS when they book or cancel an appointment. You may want your practitioners (or yourself) to receive such notifications as well. All of this can easily be enabled.

1. Go to Settings > Schedule > Client Portal.
2. Navigate to Notifications. On this page, you can select a custom template for each of the three events. (These are added under Tools > Communication > Templates):

• When a new client registers through your Client Portal;
• When a client books an appointment with you
• When a client cancels an appointment with you. 

Once you select the templates for the three events, you can select who gets the automatic email notifications. You can send notifications to Calendar contacts (practitioners), clients or any other email address of your choice.

Once you're done selecting templates for the notifications - and have turned on notifications for the relevant people, just click Save to apply the changes you've made.

Customizing the Client Portal 

1. Go to Settings > Schedule > Client Portal. 
2. Navigate to Branding. 
3. On this page, you can upload a header image or business logo.

Adding Custom Booking Instructions

Adding Terms and Conditions

Verifying New Clients

When a new client you don't know signs up through the Client Portal for the first time to book an appointment with you, it's a good idea to verify their identity. Zanda makes it easy for you to do this by offering Email and SMS verification. By enabling this feature, you also ensure that every new client that signs up through your Client Portal is providing valid contact details.

Email and SMS Verification: How it Works

1. When a new client signs up through your Client Portal, they can enter their email address or phone number to verify their identity.
2. Once done, the client will receive an email in their inbox containing the short verification code or an SMS with a short verification code depending on the verification method you selected in the settings.
3. All the client has to do is enter and submit the verification code and they will be redirected to your Client Portal where they can book an appointment with you.

Of the two verification methods, we recommend you choose SMS verification for two main reasons:

1. It is easy to use for your clients: With SMS verification, clients have to pick up their phone, look at the code and enter it on your Client Portal, which is fast and easy. With email verification, your emails might arrive late in your client's inbox or worse - become flagged as spam. This means your clients might run into trouble finding your verification email.
2. It ensures only real customers sign up: When you confirm identities via SMS, you ensure that only real people sign up - since the phone companies have already done the hard work of verifying the user. With email, this isn't the case as anyone who creates an account can fake their name, age, location and more.

Nominating Available Services

The Client Portal not only lets your clients book appointments with a clinician of their choice - it also lets them choose the exact service they want in their appointment.

That's why you want to make sure your Client Portal shows the right services for each and every clinician in your Zanda account. This will make sure clients can only book for those services your clinicians can actually perform.

With that being said, here's how to enable/disable services for clinicians in the Client Portal:

1. Go to Settings > Schedule > Client Portal.
2. Navigate to Available Services.

Here, you will see two options:

1. Group by Practitioner: On this page, you can set which practitioner can offer which services by toggling those that they can provide. 
2. Group by Services: On this page, you can select a service and choose for which practitioners that service will be available for booking purposes.

After you make the changes, Zanda will automatically apply your desired settings to your Client Portal, making it easy for your clients to book the right services with the right clinicians.

Nominating Available Times

The times that show up as available for a practitioner in the Client Portal are determined by that practitioner's availability. You can add and manage availability by going to Settings > Team > Availability. 

FAQ

• When a client registers in the portal for the first time, which 'calendar contact' is the notification sent to?

If a client registers on the portal without making a booking, the new client is assigned a primary practitioner. The primary practitioner for the account is set up Settings > Team > Practitioners > Select the desired practitioner > Settings > Enable "Default for New Clients". The primary practitioner for an individual client can be changed any time by going to the client's profile and navigating to Admin → Manage.

If after registration, the new client books an appointment with a different practitioner, the appointment practitioner will be set up as the client's Primary Practitioner automatically.  The new appointment booked notification will be sent to the appointment practitioner. 

• Can I offer multiple locations with the same availability for online bookings? 

Yes, you can. When the available spot is booked in one Location, the other locations are blocked out on the appointment practitioner calendar, to prevent double-booking.