Service Requests & Online Booking
Let customers submit service requests from a public form or the portal, and book an arrival window on a technician's calendar.
Overview
Service requests let your customers tell you they need work done without calling the office. There are two ways in: a public request form anyone can reach from a link you share, and a Requests tab inside the Customer Portal for contacts who are already signed in.
If you turn on online booking, both forms also offer an arrival window picker, so the customer picks an arrival window on your schedule as they submit. You choose whether those bookings are confirmed automatically or wait for someone on your team to accept them.
Before You Begin
Prerequisites:
Open Settings > Customer Portal and turn on Requests. Known contacts create Tickets; new people create Leads — if Tickets is not yet available for your company, ask Forz support to enable it.
For arrival windows, under Scheduling & appointments on the same page, turn on Online booking.
For online booking only: at least one job type has Available for online booking switched on, with a Booking duration (minutes) set (Settings > Job Types). Optionally set a Customer-facing label.
How a Request Becomes a Record
What Forz creates depends on who submitted the request and whether they proved their email address.
A contact you already have — becomes a Ticket on that customer's account, once the email address is verified.
Someone new — becomes a Lead, so your team can qualify them before they are added as a customer.
Someone new who submits twice — adds a note to the existing lead rather than creating a second one.
Anyone who books an arrival window — creates a ticket, a job and a calendar event together, with the window reserved on a technician.
Every request records where it came from, so your team can see at a glance that it arrived through the portal rather than over the phone.
Verifying the Customer's Email
Forz emails a short code and asks the customer to enter it before the request is filed in two situations:
They picked an arrival window. Reserving a window holds real capacity on a technician's day, so the address is proved first.
The email address they typed already belongs to one of your portal contacts. Without this step, anyone who knew that address could file requests that appear on that customer's account and read as though the customer wrote them.
The code is valid for 15 minutes. The customer can ask for a new one from the same screen.
If the code never arrives, the customer can choose I can't get the code. Their request is still filed — as a lead for your team to review — but no arrival window is held and it is not attached to an existing customer's account.
Expected result: a request submitted by a stranger with no arrival window needs no code at all, so genuine new enquiries are never slowed down.
Arrival Windows and Online Booking
When Online booking is on under Settings > Customer Portal → Scheduling & appointments, the request form shows a calendar of the days you accept work, with the arrival windows available on each one.
What the Customer Sees
Bookable job types only — the customer picks from the job types with Available for online booking switched on. They see the job type's Customer-facing label rather than your internal name; leave it blank and the job type name is used.
Your working days and hours — set by Bookable days, Bookable from and Bookable until. Days you do not work are not selectable, and neither are dates in the past.
Arrival windows, not exact times — each bookable day is divided into Arrival windows per day, so the customer is promised a window such as 8:00 AM – 12:30 PM rather than a precise appointment.
A technician chosen for them — set Booking technician group to limit which team can be booked.
Behind the scenes Forz picks which technician takes the visit, using the same scheduling logic as Smart Dispatch. The customer never chooses a person.
The Promised Window Does Not Move
The window shown to the customer is stored on the booking when they submit. If you later change your working hours or how many windows you offer per day, existing bookings keep the window the customer was originally promised. Their portal page, their confirmation email and the calendar file attached to it all show that same window.
Confirming Bookings
Bookings are confirmed automatically unless you turn that off under Confirm bookings automatically.
Automatic Confirmation (Default)
The customer gets a confirmation email straight away and the visit is on the schedule.
Staff Review
Switch off Confirm bookings automatically when you want someone to check the work before committing to it. Bookings then arrive as pending, and the customer is told that confirmation is still to come.
Open the job, or go to Tickets and use the Needs approval filter to see everything waiting.
Click Accept to confirm the visit. The customer is emailed the confirmed window.
Click Decline to release it. The window is freed and the customer is told the appointment could not be confirmed.
Expected result: the pending banner disappears from the job and the Needs approval count drops by one.
Note: if nobody accepts or declines a pending booking within Release unconfirmed bookings after (hours), Forz releases it automatically and emails the customer. This applies only when Confirm bookings automatically is off — a booking confirmed automatically is never released this way.
The Requests Tab in the Customer Portal
Signed-in contacts get a Requests tab where they can submit a request and track the ones they have already sent.
The tab shows only the requests the customer submitted themselves. Tickets your team opens on a customer's account — internal notes, escalations, anything logged from the office — stay private and never appear in the portal, whether or not the Requests tab is switched on.
For each of their own requests the customer sees the status, the service address, and the arrival window if one was booked, including whether it was confirmed, declined or released.
Sharing the Public Form
Copy the Service request form link from Settings > Customer Portal and put it on your website, in an email signature, or on a business card. It does not require a login, and it lives on your portal domain (for example cp.forz.io/acme-plumbing/request). Link to it with a link or a button — not an iframe.
Three things protect it from abuse:
A hidden field that only automated bots fill in. Submissions that fill it are silently discarded.
Rate limits on how many requests can come from one place, and how many code emails can go to one address.
An optional service area — list the prefixes you cover under Service area ZIP codes, and requests from outside them are turned away with your Out-of-area message.
Emails Customers Receive
Verification code — the short code needed to confirm the email address.
Request received — acknowledges the request and links to their portal.
Appointment confirmed — the promised arrival window, the service address, and a calendar file they can add to their own calendar.
Appointment released — sent when a pending booking is declined or expires, so the customer is never left waiting on a visit that is not happening.
Permissions
Accepting and declining bookings follows the same permission as editing a job — anyone who can edit jobs can confirm or release a booking. Turning the feature on and configuring windows, working hours and bookable job types is an Admin setting.