Long email chains, double-bookings, time zone calculations—with the new WORKetc calendar booking tool you can forget all these hassles when scheduling a meeting.
worketc-calendar-booking-tool
When trying to schedule a meeting with someone, there’s a reply that everybody dreads: “I can’t do that time, but I can do this other time.”
More often than not, that one line will descend into this so-not-wonderful conversation:
“Sorry, I can’t do that time, either. What about this time?”
“No can do. What about this time?”
“No, I won’t be available then. Can you make this time?”
And on and on and on. It’s even worse when you’re communicating by email; you wait a day or two for a reply, only to get “I can’t do that time. Can we do this time?”
Today we’re releasing a new WORKetc feature that will get rid of the pain of sending emails back and forth, again and again, and again, just to settle on a date and time for a meeting. We call it the calendar booking tool.
The WORKetc Calendar Booking Tool
WorketcCalendar Booking Tool Workflow
Our support team has been using the calendar booking tool internally for a couple of months now, and some of you may even have received emails with scheduling options inserted using the tool.
The idea behind this new tool is to not only speed up the whole process of showing people when you’re available to meet, whether for a virtual meeting or an actual face-to-face, but to take away the frustration and effort that often comes with it.
The tool helps both you and the person you want to meet with. Some studies have shown that people choose faster and better if you limit their options. You, in turn, don’t have to sweat over calculating time zone differences to make sure you do not end up scheduling a meeting for 1 AM. Plus, it effectively makes double-bookings nonexistent.
Using the Calendar Booking Tool
When you launch the email composer from anywhere in WORKetc, you’ll notice a new calendar icon in the composer toolbar between the “quote” button and the “insert WORKetc activity link” button. Clicking the calendar button will launch the new booking tool.
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When the tool loads up, you’ll see your work calendar by default, although you can easily choose another calendar to use via a dropdown menu. You can then choose which schedule options to give your client simply by clicking on an empty slot on the grid.
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Let’s say you want to schedule a meeting with a potential marketing client for some time between 2 PM and 4 PM on Wednesday your time. You can just have them come in at any time within that whole two-hour window, but that means you’ll have to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, whether you’re still working on something or not.
The calendar booking tool allows you to give that client more specific scheduling options for your meeting. You can just click on each of the four empty slots from 2 PM to 4 PM Wednesday on the calendar to give him four 30-minute schedule options.
There’s more control on both sides of the board. Your clients get to choose the best time for them to take a meeting, while you can easily build the rest of your schedule around whatever time slot they choose.
Once you’ve chosen your available time slots and clicked “Insert,” the tool will insert them as links in your email.
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Worketc Calendar Booking tool step04
You and the recipients will then get a confirmation alert and an email.
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Finally, the chosen time slot will automatically be saved as an event on your WORKetc and Google calendar.
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If you go ahead and create a new email to book another meeting before the previous person you emailed has chosen a time slot, you’ll notice that the time slots you chose for the first email are blocked off as draft events in the booking tool.
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This is to make sure that those times are kept free for that first recipient until he gets back to you and to avoid scheduling conflicts. If the recipient clicks on a time slot that has since become unavailable, he will get a notification saying that time is no longer available and will be invited to select another time.
Additional Options and Features
- Meeting title
- Meeting location
- Meeting description
- Choose which calendar to schedule on
- Set guest’s timezone
- Add additional guests via contact picker
- Show only business hours or full day
- Choose day, week, or work week view
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The new calendar booking tool also allows you to set a title, location, and description for the event you’re scheduling. All of these options are editable and the system will remember whatever title or location you used last. You can also set a default description in Settings > Event Calendar Settings.
Another very useful feature is a time zone dropdown. The calendar booking tool will show times and dates according to your own time zone, but by choosing the recipient’s time zone via the dropdown menu, the available time slots the tool inserts into your email will automatically follow the recipient’s time zone.
You don’t have to sweat over calculating what time 9 AM in New York would be in Toronto or Belfast or Tokyo. The tool will save you time and effort.
Let’s say you’re in New York and your available time slots are from 2 PM to 4 PM EDT. Your client is in Arizona, so you set the guest timezone to UTC-07:00. The email the client receives will show the available time slots as 11 AM to 1 PM MST, instead of 2 PM to 4 PM EDT.
WORKetc One Click Meetings
Exclusive Early Access and Beta Invites
For the past week, our WORKetc Insiders members have been putting the new calendar booking tool through its paces in its Insiders-exclusive, early access pre-release form. We’d like to take this opportunity to give kudos to everybody who participated, sent in bug reports, and told us their concerns and suggestions regarding the calendar booking tool.
The calendar booking tool is just the first in a long list of new releases we have lined up, all of which will lead to the massive WORKetc upgrade we have planned. To get in on future exclusive beta tests and pre-releases, join WORKetc Insiders now!
Has the new calendar booking tool already helped you arrange meetings faster? Share your experiences in the comments section.