Clients are getting ANGRY. The Client portal should only show truly available time slots!
Right now, the portal scheduler shows all *possible* booking times from a service’s availability, even if those times are already booked in the provider’s calendar.
Clients only learn the slot is unavailable after attempting to book it. This creates confusion and inefficiency, wasting the client’s valuable time, attempting to book sessions that only end up being unavailable when they go to book them.
The portal should filter and display ONLY time slots that are actually open at that moment, based on the provider’s calendar. This kind of functionality is available with most scheduling platforms these days so I cannot imagine why this program is doing self-scheduling this way. Please fix this immediately. I am using Upheal for the first time this week and my clients are NOT HAPPY ABOUT IT.
Log in to comment and vote
Comments3
Liza Shaw
Aug 27
I didn't even know clients were having that issue of disconnecting from the session. This request is actually about the way in which the self-scheduler is programmed. When a client looks up a specific service code, they see all of the POTENTIAL times that that service code is available (which comes from when I programmed the code into the services area of the portal). Not what is actually available. For example, a client sent me a screenshot yesterday (which I can't attach here as far as I can tell, but I can send it to your support team if they want to see it). This screenshot showed what looked like availability on September 2nd — it showed 3 appointments possible for the service she wanted, but I am, in fact, fully booked that day. When she clicks on the date, it tells her that none of those session times which showed up in the screenshot are actually available!! This is what made my clients very angry yesterday. It wasted their time that September 2nd even showed up when she searched for that service code! Because these clients just happen to be scheduled on that very day! Which is part of why I am booked! So it was obvious to her that there seems to be a glitch since some of the times that showed up in the screenshot were during her and her husband's appointments!! I asked the AI assistant about why this availability was showing up when I am fully booked, and the response I got was that this is just how the self-scheduler works — because it is programmed to pull from the service’s POTENTIAL availability (configured by the times I programmed in when I first added the services!), rather than the actual availability for the date she had clicked on. This is one of the least efficient ways I've ever seen a self-scheduler work!
If I am not doing a good enough job explaining this, I could have a phone call.
Upheal Moderator
Aug 27
You were right, and thank you for pushing back - this was on our side, not your calendar.
When a client's computer is set to a timezone behind yours, one day just past the end of the month they were viewing wasn't checked against your calendar properly, and could then be shown to them as the next available date. September 2nd is exactly that day for the August view — which is why three times appeared under it, and why they vanished as soon as September opened and the day was checked correctly.
This is now fixed and live. September 2nd should show as unavailable.
Two notes. Our in-app assistant told you the scheduler only shows a service's potential times rather than your real availability - that was wrong, it does check your calendar. And in Calendar Settings, four of your five connected Google calendars have "affects availability" switched off, so only your main calendar is currently blocking times. Worth a look if any client appointments live on the others.
If it happens again, tell us here and we'll pick it straight back up. This one wasn't unique to your account, so your report fixed it for other practices as well — thank you for staying on it.
Upheal Moderator
Aug 26
Thank you for reporting this, and we’re sorry - your first week should not have looked like this.
We went through your account, and we think we found what your clients were hitting. It isn’t the calendar.
When a client joins a video session and then goes back to the portal, the portal stops working for them - pages fail to load, and “Try again” doesn’t help. Their way back in is the link in their original invitation email, but that link only works once, so most people find it already used and get stuck. We can see this happening to several of your clients last week, one of them about an hour before you wrote this.
If a client gets stuck, they can fix it themselves without waiting for you: go to the Client Portal sign-in page and request a new link by email. We’re fixing both parts.
What we couldn’t find was a booking being refused — the times on offer matched your calendar, and every booking your clients made went through. So, when your clients said a time wasn’t available: was it that they couldn’t get into the portal at all, or did they pick a time and then get an error?