Diary Gaps

TL;DR

Release 2.11.0 sees the introduction of Diary Gaps; a brand new feature that helps you turn space in your diary into a booked lesson. Create a 'diary gap' in your diary, select the students you'd like to offer it to, and wait for one to snap it up. When they do, the 'diary gap' is automatically converted into a booked lesson in your diary, helping you to maximise your time and earning potential.

Diary Gaps - The Essentials

We've all experienced those sudden cancellations and faced the problem of trying to fill the gap with someone else at very short notice or twiddling our thumbs over another cup of coffee. Our diary gaps feature solves this problem.

You can now advertise a gap in your diary to as many of your students as you wish and making use of an intelligent algorithm we'll even recommend those students who are the best fit for that gap. The first student who responds positively to the invitation will automatically put a confirmed lesson in your diary.

Optionally, you can specify that, if the gap is accepted, it creates a provisional lesson instead of a confirmed one.

When you send the invitations to your students, they will receive a notification and will be able to accept, decline or ignore any gap that is being offered. If they choose to accept the gap, they will be able to select their pick-up and drop-off points and the lesson will be automatically created in your diary.

Adding a Diary Gap

Adding a gap is done via the same mechanism as adding a lesson - it's a new option - and ultimately it will add a lesson of your default type and duration.

Confirm the time that you want the lesson to start, change the duration if you wish and specify whether you want the subsequent lesson to be provisional.

Student Selection

The app will recommend students which it believes to be the best match for your diary gap and list these in order of suitability.

The longer the coloured bar, the more suitable the student is. You are not tied to only inviting recommended students, you can exclude or include students from anywhere in the list just by changing the toggle. You can also invite all your students or not as you require.

Where a student does not have the student app, identified on the list by a warning, they will not receive notification of the gap. However, if they subsequently sign up to the app, they will receive any suitable diary gaps which are still available.

Note: The criteria for the suitability score is a closely guarded secret so we can't go into too much detail but you can see the score that they get by hovering over or clicking on the coloured bar.

When you click Save, the invitations will be sent to the selected students and the gap will be created in the diary.

Changing a Diary Gap

You cannot change a diary gap. However, you can send it to more students and you can re-invite those already invited but you cannot withdraw an invitation already made. If you want to do this, you will need to delete and re-create the diary gap.

To offer it to more students, click on it and then click 'Offer to more students'. This will show you any recommended students not yet invited plus all the other active students who are available. It will exclude anyone already invited.

Note: If you choose to re-send the invites, it will not send them to any students who have already declined the offer. However, if they just ignored it, re-sending the invite will send it to them again.

Deleting a Diary Gap

If you decide that you no longer require the gap or that you want to change it, you will need to delete the gap which you can do by clicking the 'Delete' button and then confirming the deletion.

The Student App

So, what happens at the other end?

Any students that you have selected, who use the student app and have notifications turned on, will receive a diary gap notification. This is one of the reasons why we recommend that your students allow notifications from the MDT app.

If they click that notification or go into the app anyway, they will get a pop-up showing any and all available diary gaps that they have been invited to take. Alternatively, they can drag the notification open and respond directly using the options available.

If they open the app, they can accept or decline the diary gap by clicking the relevant button. Alternatively, if they want to come back to it later or want to keep the option open, they can ignore the diary gap by clicking the X in the top right corner.

Note: Diary gaps are processed on a 'fastest finger first' basis. Therefore, the first student to complete the booking process will get the booking. We do not 'hold it' for 15 minutes while they consult their friendship circle via social media! If they are unlucky enough to miss out, we let them down gently.

Accepting the Diary Gap

The student gets the option to select their pick-up and drop-off addresses if they want to with their default address being shown first. They can also add a new address although we would recommend that they discuss that with you as it may not be convenient.

Once they choose 'Book Lesson' the diary gap will be deleted and a lesson put in its place in your diary. You will receive a notification that the lesson has been booked, which if you click on it will bring up a preview of the lesson in your diary.

Declining the Gap

If the student declines the gap, your diary will be updated accordingly with a little cross in a red circle followed by the number of students who have declined the gap. If you click on the gap itself, you can see who has declined and when.

And Finally...

Not Clever Enough? Too Clever?

In designing this new feature we have tried to add some intelligence to make your job easier, specifically in relation to the recommendations of students to fill any gap that you have. We believe the recommendations it makes will be sensible but now we need your feedback.

You know your students much better than we do so you may notice that a particular student is always being left out of the recommendations or is always at the top when you know better. If there are persistent anomalies i.e., the same student over and over again, or you think the app should take something else into account when making its recommendations, why don't you let us know via the usual method?

And as always, if you find any issues with this release or anything else, please contact us at support@mydrivetime.co.uk.