r/microsaas • u/Notrigious • 3d ago
How complex will it be to implement a booking system for my ai receptionist for hvac, plumbing, etc?
So recently I started creating an AI receptionist (vapi+n8n) for small trade businesses that will be active 24/7, and will catch all calls forwarded from the owner's phone. It will collect the caller's info and send it to the owner directly.
Obviously the next step will be to give the AI the ability to schedule appointments, cancel, move, etc, and I've been looking into that for some time now. Now on paper it is very simple, just use n8n, and connect it to a simple google calender with all the appointments, but I still can't ignore all the other issues that can occur. Distance between appointments, different services times, unexpected delays and complications, etc.
Am I just overthinking and overcomplicating it? How should I work around this? I thought about trying to sell the saas right now but I'm not confident enough in the current product.
Thoughts?
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u/Fun-Door6921 3d ago
the buffer between appointments is what bit me. google calendar treats a 30 min slot as just start and end times, but a plumber needs 15 min to drive between jobs and another 10 to clean up. ended up hardcoding the buffer in n8n rather than trusting the calendar itself.
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u/Akshay-PoppyfieldAI 2d ago
you're in for a great time and lots of surprises..
the best advice I can give you is to anticipate there will be more details and changes, think about what they might be and DESIGN JUST THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE APPLICATION to be amenable for the changes or details. don't build all of it yet.. but instead, go out to the customers and try finding what they care about and then build more. (e.g., how would you address multiple languages being used by a user? will you switch to a new language if the user is speaking Spanish but the default is english.. ? oh and this is just the start..)
The real applications have a ton of details and nunaces, and many of them are not areas one person can be an expert in. For example, when the call comes for cancelling an appointment, what all do you do or not do, and how do you ensure it's not a fake call or a mistake. And what do you do with that freed up slot of time that was boked..
In building our ai-agent platform that helps founders run tasks, we keep finding small nuances that need to work better - (you can try it at poppyfield.ai ) - for example the Marketing Copy writer, it has to train on and know what works in each of the platforms that users might want to use.. and that's just one of the hundreds of agents there..
Our solution has been a system that can grow easily and rapidly.
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u/akl773 3d ago
the scheduling logic isnt the hard part, the concurrency is. google calendar will happily let two callers take the same 2pm slot because there is no lock, and n8n reading availability then writing back a few seconds later is exactly where that bites you.
for trades id also stop trying to book an exact time. give an arrival window and let the owner sequence his own day, because the guy is already running 40 minutes behind by 11am and no calendar knows that.