Exploring Calendar Features

In the previous calendar articles, we created a new team and added a team calendar. For this article, let's explore more features included with your platform's calendars.

Navigating Calendars

Click “Settings” on the left menu and then click “Calendars” on the settings menu to open your calendar settings. We'll start by looking at the 2 settings directly to the right of Calendars.

Calendar Preferences

The first is Calendar Preferences. Let's click “Calendar Preferences” now.

In the new window, you can set your preferred starting day for the week.

The next field lets you choose what language you'd like your calendar widgets to be displayed in. We're going to choose English here.

And with the last option in Calendar Preferences, you can set whether you prefer an AM/PM or 24-hour clock.

After making changes to your Calendar Preferences, click “Save”.

Calendar Codes and Links

Find the links and codes to embed your calendar in the Calendar Settings. Click on the 3 dots and choose from the dropdown. Below are the options to delete and move group calendars as well.

Integrations

From Settings, Let's click “Integrations”  in the left Settings menu, and then click “Connect” under the Google logo.

To integrate your calendar, you'll need to sign into your Google account. 

First, enter your Google login and click “Next”. Then enter your password and click “Next” again.

Click “Allow” to accept the permissions.

If you have any business pages linked to Google, they will appear on this page. Select the business page you'd like to use and then click “Close”.

On the Integrations page, a green connected button under Google will now show that everything is set up correctly.

Next, let's click “Profile” on the left Settings menu, and scroll down the page until you come to the Calendar Configuration field in the right column.

Here, you’ll select the Google Calendar you want to integrate with your platform's calendar. Click “Edit” under the primary calendar.

 On the popup, you can select from a list of calendar conflicts.

For example, in a list like this, selecting family and birthdays would mean that these events will not create conflicts on our platform's booking calendar.

Then click “Save” again.

Appointments

Now let's explore how to manually create events in our calendar. Click “Go Back” in the top left to exit Settings.

Click “Calendars” on the left menu, and then Click “Appointments”.

Let's create a new appointment. Click “+ Book Appointment” in the top right. 

In the window that appears, search the name, email, phone or company of the contact in the search bar. 

You can also manually add the contact by filling in the information in the next window.

Click “Save” once done.

On the next window, choose the calendar from the dropdown. Set the time zone, date and slot, and the appointment title. 

Click on “Additional Preferences” to add the meeting location. You can set it by default or custom, where you can set the meeting location specific to the appointment.

Now, click “Reporting” in the left menu, and then click “Appointment Report” in the top menu.

This view gives you quite a bit of information about your appointments, including how many were booked and confirmed, how many showed or were no-shows, and how many were canceled. In addition, this view shows you the source of the bookings and their outcomes.

Custom Values

Next, let's look at how we can use custom values to insert booking information into a campaign email event. 

Click “Automation” on the left, and then click “Campaigns” at the top. Now click the “Create Campaign button” in the top right.

In the popup, you’ll need to name your campaign. We’ll call ours Admissions App Reminder. 

Click “Save” to create the campaign.

Our campaign is built, but now we need to add an event. 

Click the “Add Event” button, and then choose Email from the popup list.

In the pop-up, fill the email name and the subject line fields.

We're going to call our event, Reminder. And the subject of the email is Appointment Reminder.

Next, let's create the body text of the email.

For our salutation, we want to use the attendee's name. To do that, we write “Hi” and then insert a custom value. 

Click the Custom Values dropdown, and select Full Name on the Contact tab.

As you can see, we now have a custom value in our body. When the email is sent, this value will be replaced by the contact's name. 

In our email, we also want to add the day and time of the appointment. 

Click “Custom Values” again, and this time, select Start Date Time from the Appointments tab.

We can add even more information to the email using custom values. Let's tell the attendee who they'll be meeting with.

Click “Custom Values”, and select Full Name from the Appointment User tab. This will return the name of the team member assigned to the appointment.

Let's assume that the appointment will be a Zoom call and take the custom values concept even further. If we added a link for the meeting location when we set up our team, then the custom value will return it here. 

 You can insert it by clicking Custom Values, and then selecting Meeting Location from the Appointment tab.

 Now we've included all the information we need to give our appointment attendee. Click “Save” to create the event.