One of the first questions a multi-person team asks when setting up online booking is: should clients see a list of staff and pick one, or just get the next available slot? There isn't a single right answer -- it depends on what your business actually sells.
When it helps
If what clients are really booking is a relationship with a specific person -- a hairdresser, a personal trainer, a tutor, a therapist -- hiding who they'll see behind a plain time picker works against you. Clients who've been to you before want to rebook with the same person, and new clients often choose based on a specific stylist's portfolio or a trainer's specialty. Forcing "any available" onto that kind of business doesn't simplify the booking flow, it just creates a worse one: people either abandon the booking to call and ask who's working, or book blind and are disappointed.
When it gets in the way
If the service itself is the product -- a car valet, a dog groomer's "medium wash," a venue walkthrough -- clients usually don't have a staff preference at all, and a picker just adds a step between "I want this" and "booked." For these businesses, "any available" (or not showing a picker at all) gets people through checkout faster, and spreads bookings more evenly across whoever's actually free that day instead of everyone piling onto one popular name.
The middle ground: decide per service, not per business
The useful realization is that this isn't a business-wide setting -- different services at the same business can want different answers. A hair salon's colour and cut services clearly benefit from a stylist picker; the same salon's "patch test" (a quick, five-minute compatibility check before a colour appointment) doesn't need one at all.
In ScheduloApp, this is exactly how it works: the picker isn't a single on/off switch for your whole business. Go to Settings > Services, edit a service, and choose which team members are assigned to it. As soon as a service has 2 or more team members assigned, clients booking that service automatically see a "choose a team member" step (with an "Any Available" option for people without a preference). A service with only one assigned member skips the step entirely -- no picker, no decision for the client to make.
A few things worth knowing before you turn it on
- "Any Available" doesn't lock in a person at browse time. When a client picks it, who actually gets the booking is decided at the moment it's confirmed (or paid), not when they're looking at times -- so two people browsing the same slot don't end up fighting over which specific staff member "has" it.
- Each team member's own hours matter here. If you've set different working hours for different staff (Settings > Hours has a picker for this once you have more than one team member), the available times shown already reflect whoever's selected -- a client won't be offered a slot outside that person's actual schedule.
- It's reversible per service, not a big commitment. If you turn on the picker for a service and find it's just adding friction without clients actually having a preference, unassigning everyone but one team member removes the step immediately.
The honest test: if you'd be annoyed to be assigned a random colleague for that specific service, your clients probably feel the same way, and the picker is worth the extra step. If you genuinely wouldn't mind who you got, skip it.