Help customers choose with routing questions

Ask a question or two before the booking form starts, and send each customer straight to the right service, a category, a message or another page.

Routing questions sit in front of your booking form, asked before a customer picks a service or a date or gives their name. Each answer decides where they go next: on into the form, straight to one service, to one category, to another web page, or to a message saying how to book instead. Use them when your menu is long enough that people pick the wrong thing, or when some people should not book online at all — children, say, or someone booking for a relative.

Routing questions or screening questions?

Routing is a signpost, not an assessment: it never marks anyone eligible or flags a booking. If a question is about whether one treatment suits someone, it belongs on that service — see Screening questions and eligibility.

Switch routing on

1. Open Booked › Booking formUnder Your booking forms, press Edit next to Default form. Build your questions here even if you use other forms too — see “More than one booking form” below.
2. Click the Routing tabIt sits between Convert and Code.
3. Turn on Ask routing questionsUntil there is a question the card warns “Add at least one question — until then the step stays off.”
4. Word the stepFill in Badge, Heading, The line under the heading, Step name and Continue button.
5. Press Add a question, build it, then press Save formNothing reaches your website until you save. The editor stays open afterwards.

• 1Routing — the fifth tab. Every form has one, but the Default form’s decides where people go.
• 2Let AI build this for you — drafts the questions from a sentence. See below.
• 3Ask routing questions — the master switch. It saves as off while the form has no questions.
• 4The wording — Badge, Heading, The line under the heading, Step name (the step’s name in the progress bar) and Continue button. Empty a badge or heading to leave it out.
• 5One question per screen — on, customers get one question at a time with a count. Off puts every question on one panel.
• 6Live preview — shows your questions whenever any exist, even with the switch off. It asks the saved version where each answer leads, so save before you test.

Left alone, the step reads “A few questions before you choose a date” under the badge “Verification-safe booking route”, with the line “These questions only guide the booking route. They do not assess or approve care.” Whatever you write, keep a line like that: people read health questions as a decision about them unless told otherwise.

Build a question

Each question has its own card. Type the wording into Question, add Help text if it needs explaining, and choose how it is Answered with: Answer cards, Yes / No, A number, A date or Free text. The arrows at the top of the card move it up or down; the bin removes it.

• 1Answered with and Must be answered — the answer type decides whether routes hang off answers or off rules. Every new question starts with Must be answered on.
• 2When the answer … This — a rule for a typed answer: is, is not, is less than, is at most, is more than, is at least, contains, or is answered at all.
• 3Stop and show a message — Heading, What they should do instead, and a button that only appears when both Button text and Button link are filled in.
• 4Answer and The line underneath — the card the customer taps and the grey line under it. A plain restatement there stops people picking the wrong card.
• 5If they choose this… — the route for this answer, with the service or category to go to.
• 6Add an answer — a question starts with two answers, the fewest it can have.

Answer cards and Yes / No give each answer its own route, up to 12 answers. For Yes / No, type “Yes” and “No” into the two answers yourself — the grey “Yes” in each box is only a placeholder.

A number, a date or free text has nothing to tap, so you add rules with Add a rule instead, up to 10. The first rule that matches wins, and an answer that matches none carries on booking. Text comparisons ignore capital letters. For a date, type the rule’s value as year-month-day, like 2010-09-28: that is the form the customer’s answer arrives in.

Where an answer can lead

Questions are checked in order, and the first answer that does anything other than Carry on booking decides. Later questions are not asked. So put the broadest gate first — the age question before “What would you like to book?” in the example above. An answer set to a service, category or link with none filled in is saved as Carry on booking, so a half-finished route never stops anyone.

Let AI draft them

Press Let AI build this for you, say who should go where in What should happen? — name your services, it knows them — and press Draft the questions. The draft replaces the questions on screen and switches Ask routing questions on, but nothing is saved until you press Save form, so read every route first. It only sends people to services and categories you actually have; anything else becomes Carry on booking. Each draft uses 8 AI credits from your monthly AI allowance.

What the customer sees

The questions become the first step of the form. With One question per screen on, customers answer one at a time; turn it off and every question sits on one panel, which suits two or three short ones better.

• 1Step name — the questions are the first step in the progress bar, named by Step name. Left at its default it reads “Questions”.
• 2Badge, heading and line — shown above every question.
• 3Question 2 of 2 — the count appears only with One question per screen on.
• 4An answer card — your Answer, with The line underneath in grey.
• 5Back and Continue — Back appears from the second question on. Continue uses your Continue button wording and reads “Checking…” while Booked works out what comes next.

Each time they press Continue, Booked asks your website what happens next. Your routes never reach the customer’s browser, so nobody can read them in the page source and pick the answer that gets them through. For the same reason, a form that asks routing questions only accepts a booking from someone who answered them.

An answer set to Stop and show a message swaps the question for your message.

• 1Heading — yours, or “Let’s get you to the right place” if you leave it empty.
• 2What they should do instead — your message. Line breaks you type are not kept, so a sentence or two works best.
• 3Your button — opens Button link. A tel: link rings the number on a phone.
• 4Change my answers — always there. It clears the answers and starts again from the first question.

Limits and gotchas

• A service route skips the branch. If the service runs at more than one branch, the location step is passed over and the first branch that offers it is filled in. It shows in the summary, but the customer has to go Back to change it.
• Optional questions can vanish. With One question per screen on, a question with Must be answered off is skipped unless it comes first. Leave it on, or put the questions on one panel.
• Blank questions are dropped. When you save, a question with no wording disappears, and so does an answer-card question with no answers typed in.
• Limits. Up to 20 questions, 12 answers per question and 10 rules per typed question. Anything past that is dropped on save.

More than one booking form

Each variant under Your booking forms has its own Routing tab, but routing really runs from the Default form.

• The Default form’s switch decides. With Ask routing questions off there, no variant asks, whatever its own tab says.
• So do its routes. A new variant starts with a copy of the Default form’s questions and shows that copy’s wording, but where each answer leads is always worked out from the Default form, so changing a route on a variant does nothing. Add or remove questions or answers on either one later and the two stop lining up, which can leave customers stuck on a question. Add the variant again once your questions are settled.
• To skip the questions on one page, use [get_booked prequal="off"]. It has no effect on a variant’s shortcode.

Where the answers show up

• On the booking. Open it and look under Questions & secure documents: Answered before booking lists each question and answer. Only the answers up to the one that decided the route are kept.
• Live. Someone on the questions counts under Opened the form — see The Live view.
• Unfinished. People who leave during the questions, including those you stopped or sent elsewhere, are listed as stopping at Screening questions — the name this step goes by there and on the Dashboard’s Form funnel. Their answers are under What they told you, where an answer can show as a short code such as cat_3 rather than its wording. See Unfinished bookings.
• Insights has no routing report: nothing counts which answers people choose.

Live and Unfinished only fill in while Record unfinished bookings is on, under Settings › Booking rules.