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.
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.
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.
Now let's look at the second setting. Click Calendar Code.
This popup lets you easily find your calendar URL and embed code.
In the first dropdown, we'll select a calendar team - our calendar team was Admissions.
And then select your calendar from the second dropdown - ours was also called Admissions.
If the Dedicated Calendar URL toggle is enabled, then users will not be able to click back to return to the calendars list.
And here is the calendar URL. Below the URL is the code you can use to embed the calendar widget.
Now, we'll show you how you can integrate your platform's calendar with a Google Calendar account.
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 primary calendar.
And a popup will appear. Select the first option to sync your Google Calendar.
If you have more than one Google Calendar, you can select the calendar you want to use from the dropdown list.
Allow contact creation means that you can allow events created on your Google calendar to be synced back to your platform's calendar.
Lastly, click Save.
The next section lets you decide how to handle conflicts between your platform's calendar and your Google calendar. Click edit.
On the popup, you can select from a list for 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.
Great! We've set up some advanced configurations for our calendar.
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 Schedule Appointment in the top right.
In the window that appears, we'll start by clicking the calendar dropdown to select the calendar we want to add the appointment to.
We'll choose our Admissions calendar.
Next, you'll need to decide whether this appointment should be assigned by round-robin or if you want to assign the appointment manually.
We want to assign it manually, so we'll click Pick Team Member, and then select the team member from the dropdown list.
We're going to give this appointment to Alfa.
To finish, we'll just need to fill in the day, time, and the contact's name. Once the name is entered, the rest of the details will be automatically filled. Lastly, we'll click Save to add the appointment to the calendar.
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.
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 into 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.
This concludes our series of tutorial articles on the new updates for your platform's Calendars feature.