Where do I write my cancellation and drop-off policies?

Two things on this page reach clients: your policies, on the booking page and quoted back when someone cancels late, and a bank of answers your assistant uses when a client asks a question in the portal.

Your policies are live whatever else you do here. The bank of answers is not: it waits until you turn the assistant on.

Turning the assistant on

The card at the top of the page says whether clients are getting automatic answers. New stores start off, and it stays off until you switch it on, so nothing you write here is read by a client before you are ready.

Try it the way a client would. Type a question into the box and you get back exactly what a client would get, word for word, from the answers you have saved. Not a sample and not a rewording: the same answer, picked the same way. Four suggested questions sit under the box because they each land differently, which makes them a quick way to sanity-check the lot:

• one answered from your settings
• one answered from something you wrote
• one most stores have not answered yet
• one that is passed to you rather than answered

Under each answer is a line saying where it came from, so a wrong answer tells you which box to go and fix.

Trying a question does not count as a client asking. It never shows up in Questions you could not answer, and it changes nothing about your settings.

Turn on for clients is the switch. From that moment a client who asks in the portal gets your ready answers straight away, and anything you have not answered still comes to you. Turn off stops it immediately. Clients can always message you either way, and your policies are unaffected.

Try a handful of questions before you turn it on, and again after you add answers. It costs nothing and it is the only way to read what a client reads before they read it.

Letting it word an answer for you

A second switch appears under the first once the assistant is on: Let it word an answer for you.

With it off, a client gets an answer only when one of yours fits their question closely. That is safe, and it means a client who asks the same thing in different words can end up with nothing, even though you wrote the answer weeks ago. "Can my two dogs be done at the same time" does not look much like "Do you groom siblings together?", so it finds nothing.

With it on, the assistant can put an answer together from what you wrote, for questions no single answer covers. Three things are always true of those answers:

• It only ever uses your answers. It cannot bring in anything from elsewhere, and if none of your answers covers the question it says so rather than filling the gap.
• It never mentions a price. If wording an answer would mean quoting money, it passes the question to you instead.
• The client is told the wording is ours. The answer is marked "Answered automatically, in our words", and it lists which of your answers it came from.

In the box above, these show up with a Written for you tag. Read a few before you turn it on. Often you will find it simply gives your answer back word for word, which is the best outcome: your wording, reaching a question your wording alone would have missed.

Turning it off leaves the rest of the assistant working exactly as before.

Policies

• Cancellation policy: your words ("We require at least 24 hours notice for cancellations"). It appears on the booking page, in confirmations and reminders, and on the acknowledgement a client sees when cancelling inside your window. If the text says one number of hours and your cancellation window setting says another, the page flags it and offers to fix either.
• Drop-off and pick-up: where to park, how early to arrive, what to bring. Shown on confirmations and reminders.

Both save through the Save changes pill.

Questions clients ask

A seeded list of the questions groomers get asked ("Do you take cats?", "Do I need to bring vaccination records?"). Each has an answer box and a ready tick; an answer is not used until it is ticked, and a blank one cannot be.

Some answers are marked Answered from your settings: your hours, closures, services, contact details, booking window and deposits. Those have no box to type in, on purpose. They read live from the setting that owns them, so they can never go stale, and each shows an Edit in Settings link.

Questions you add yourself: write your own question and answer, up to the cap shown. Remove any you no longer want.

Questions you could not answer

When a client asks something in the portal and there is no ready answer for it, the question lands in a card near the top of this page. It only appears when there is something in it.

Each row is one real question in the client's own words, with how many times it has been asked if that is more than once. Most-asked comes first, so the top row is the one worth your time. Where we recognised the topic, the row says which of your answers is still empty.

Two buttons:

• Answer this opens a new question box below, already filled in with the client's own wording. Type your answer, tick it ready, and Save changes. The row clears and the next client to ask gets your answer.
• Not something we answer puts the question away. It will not come back even if someone asks again.

Questions about money, health, an incident or a complaint are never listed here. Those are passed straight to you by design rather than treated as a missing answer.

The coverage strip

Below the assistant card: how many answers are ready, how many are answered from settings, how many are still blank. Turning the assistant on does not change these numbers. It changes who can see them.

Where the answers go

When the assistant is on, a client asking a question in the portal draws on this bank, and only on answers you ticked ready. Nothing is invented on your behalf: a question with no ready answer is told honestly that we do not have it, and then it turns up in the card above for you to answer.

If you also let it word answers for you, it can stretch those same answers to cover questions asked in different words, and it still only uses what you wrote.

While the assistant is off, a client asking a question is simply pointed at you, and nothing here is shown to them.