There are probably few things more frustrating than when a client cancels a shift (or worse--an entire order).
Luckily, the platform has some robust client cancellation policy configurations that can make that sting a little less and make the process smoother.
In this article we will discuss two things:
How to set up and configure your policy
How the policy works in practice and its implications.
How to Configure Cancellation Policy:
To get things set up to match your expectations, navigate from the admin dashboard to Configuration-->Platform Set Up-->Client Experience. Then scroll to Cancellation Policy, to start customizing your policy
The default for the platform is that cancellation is free, aka that there is no cancellation policy. The policy you configure in this section is an exception to that default rule.
Let’s take a look at the configurations:
Penalty threshold: How many hours before the shift will the cancellation policy kick in?
Maybe it will be 24 hours beforehand, or maybe a full week. Any cancellation before this time would be considered free.
How will the penalty be calculated?
You have two choices in this:
Fix Hours: This is when we want to charge a minimum number of hours if the client cancels. You can provide the number of hours.
A percentage of the shift hours: You can provide what percentage of the shift client needs to pay.
How will clients know what the policy is?
While of course, we recommend that it has been previously communicated to them, you can add a written description of the policy (and even spruce it up with some HTML if you so wish)
Replacements:
Say the client doesn’t actually want to cancel the shift, they just don’t want that particular candidate. Will you allow them to do that? Replacements have an impact on cancellation policy as well. If a client wants to replace a candidate for a shift, it still counts as cancellation. Hence you can configure if the client can request replacement or not.
Now, let’s take a look at the implications of having a cancellation policy in place.
Showing Cancellation policy: If a client clicks on the cancel button for a shift, they would now see a screen with the cancellation policy highlighted. They can then choose to proceed with cancellation.
When a client cancels the shift, runs the shift through cancellation policy:
The platform would first check if this cancellation is free or penalized. The shift is penalized if the cancellation took effect within the penalty threshold.
If the shift has to be penalized, the platform would calculate the number of hours on which the penalty is applied.
The platform would then check all the candidates that were scheduled to work for this shift.
Each candidate assigned to the shift would be cancelled and notified about the cancellation.
The platform would then generate an accounting entry to charge the client for the number of penalty hours at the bill rate or the % of the total billed hours, per the policy, and an accounting entry to pay the candidates for the penalty hours at the corresponding pay rate. The platform would not actually charge or pay for any of this. It just creates an accounting entry to show up in their next invoice.
If no candidates were assigned to the shift, there would be no penalty.
The cancellation process is followed exactly the same way when a client is seeking replacement.
Handling replacement as a recruiter / admin:
When we as admin click on ‘cancel’ or ‘replacement’ button, we would have an option to specify if this was requested by the client or candidate.
If requested by the client: The platform would run the cancellation through the cancellation policy as described above.
If not requested by client: The platform would skip the cancellation policy and no cancellation billing or payment would be made.
If requested by the candidate: We would factor this cancellation into calculating how reliable this candidate is.
If not requested by the candidate: We would not attribute this cancellation to the candidate and their reliability score would not be impacted.
We hope you find this useful.