Scheduler: Getting Started

Drew Ross: Hello everybody. My name is Drew and today we're talking about the exciting new update to Viploud's scheduler. Uh, so thisuler is going to have more features and be more deeply integrated into VIP cloud than ever before. So, we're really really excited about that and I'm going to walk you through all that it can do and also how to set it up uh as well. So, first of all, it uh is deeply integrated into the CRM. It actually you might notice especially if you use our sign up forms. It has a lot of uh a lot of shared functionality with signup for which makes sense once you uh once you see it in action. Um but things that it'll do for instance are create contacts based on meetings being booked with you can update existing contacts like let's say somebody has the same email address as a contact in your system. it'll recognize that's the same person. But if you're asking some additional information on that signup form, uh the questions that that are being asked, it'll add that information to the uh the contacts record.

Drew Ross: You can have automations trigger based on people booking meetings with you as well as have automations stop based on somebody booking with you, like a reminder series to schedule an event. This way you stop uh needlessly reminding people to do things that they have already done if they've booked that meeting. So a lot of cool things that can be done there. Additionally, uh users who maybe don't use inbox sync or don't have that available in their subscription, well you can actually now uh use schedulers. So it doesn't rely on our inbox sync functionality. You don't have to have uh a custom domain either. So if you're atgmail.com user or a Microsoft email user, you can also now use ouruler. So really excited about that. So um let's let's jump right into this. So you can get to your schedulers from the automations. So you click on the automations tab and then in that sidebar right there, click on schedulers. Um, one thing I should mention here too, you actually like our schedulers can work even if you don't integrate with a calendar.

Drew Ross: The way that will work is Viploud will just use its own calendar and if somebody books a meeting with you at a particular time, our scheduler is going to know about that and it won't uh book any conflicting events with that just ba and and so this will just be based on uh the meetings that our system knows about. But if you want our system to also know about the meetings that are on your Google calendar, your Microsoft calendar, well then that's where you'll want to use an integration. And here's where you can you can uh do that. So just click on one of those, authenticate it, uh agree to the permissions, and you'll be rocking and rolling. To create auler, you hit that green createuler button. And we're now looking at the details page. Here's where we are going to give it a a meeting name. This is all filled out by default. You can give it a URL slug. What this is is the like it'll it'll be, you know, vipcal.com.

Drew Ross: Here's what's going to follow after that slash. So, you can uh you can personalize that right there. We can choose our connected calendar. In this example, I haven't connected it with a Google or Microsoft calendar, but in this dropdown, you'll see that available. VipCloud calendar is the default. That's what I was describing earlier. We got our meeting durations. Got 15 minute increments, but we can also choose a custom duration as well. This conferencing option, this is going to be where the meeting takes place. So, um, this none right here is going to be like, you know, in a in a case where maybe it's self-evident where the where the meeting is going to be taking place. If you're using Google as a Google calendar, uh we got a Google Meet integration right there. So you can select that. Zoom. If uh basically like if you use a personal meeting ID, like a link that is always active for your for your meetings, then just paste that personal meeting URL in there.

Drew Ross: We have a help center article on how to do that if that's not something that you uh are familiar with. And then of course we got phone as an option too. Just make sure that if you're using phone as an option that you are asking them for their phone number uh as a part as uh something that will go through on a I think it's on the next page or it's the page after description. This is going to be where you describe what the meeting is for, what their expectations are, things along those lines. If you're using phone as an option, I recommend uh if you're going to call them at that time, I recommend specifying that I'll call you at the meeting number that you uh provided. In this case, we're going to keep it simple. We're going to stick with none right here. And then we have two options right here. Create and return to schedulers. That's like if you are uh good with the default settings, then you can move along with that.

Drew Ross: We're going to hit create and continue editing to stay on this page. Um, so what we'll see by the way is in the upper right corner now we have a view booking page button as well as a copy booking link button. So this uh booking page I can click on that and we're going to be able to preview our meeting uh as it has been configured already. So, we're going to go over to the scheduling tab right now. Here's where we decide the um some of the specifics about what the rules are for people booking meetings with us. So, uh working from the top down, we've got choose scheduling option where it can be you can limit it to a certain amount of time in the future as well as a date range too. So if you got a particular kind of meeting type where it's actually it needs to end at a certain time uh that that doesn't continuously move forward into the future. You are able to choose that though most people just set a number of days in the future and we got a bunch of increments there.

Drew Ross: Now for availability this is going to be is this a one-on-one meeting or a group meeting. So that's also an addition. This is something that's new with this enhancement where you can have uh meetings where people are able to where multiple people can book and you can then decide what the group size is for those kinds of meetings. Next here we tell people what our open hours are. Basically when people can um can book meetings with us. All pretty self-evident. Buffer time as when we check this, this also uh is pretty basic where um how much time do we need um before a meeting and after a meeting like what that what's that availability um I I recommend definitely uh putting some buffer time for your meetings. minimum notice. I also recommend adding something here so that people aren't uh surprising you with meetings, you know, maybe a couple of hours or something like that. Also, uh custom start increments. This is new from our uh previous uh scheduler. And what this mean like this is particularly helpful if you have meetings that are longer.

Drew Ross: So, for instance, let's say you have 60-minute meetings that people are going to be scheduling here. Do you want those 60-minute meetings to only be available for people to schedule at the top of the hour every hour? Let's say you've got a whole day that's wide open. um do you only want them to be able to do top of the hour every hour or maybe with like 15 minute increments. This means that people can um have some flexibility with maybe being able to book a meeting with you at 10:15 or 10:45 or something as opposed to only being stuck with 10 o'clock and 11 o'clock as the available times. If this doesn't make sense, just play around with it and uh look at your available times on the booking page and uh and and then it should make sense. And then daily limit. Um do we not want to have uh a million 15 minute meetings uh on you know in a given day or something like that? You can you can set a cap to it.

Drew Ross: And then we've got some time time zone settings here as well. you know, if you want people to have their uh the invitees time zone displayed versus locking it uh to your time zone. All right, form fields. So, if you are a signup form user, this will look uh very very familiar to you. I'm not going to go too too much into detail here because we've got a help article if you're not familiar with these, but the the short version of it is that uh these contact fields, these are going to be like the fields that are actually on on a contact record. And so if you want the information that you collect when people are booking meetings with you to appear on the um on the contact record, use these fields. Uh if you are asking people things that are maybe like only specific to the meeting for instance, just do a create field for form and then this will be uh this will make it so you don't have to create a custom field for it.

Drew Ross: Um, these are all drag and drop, so you can reorder them that way. And you can decide if things are going to be required or not with this required field right here. And just make sure, especially so that people um get merged uh so that our system doesn't create duplicate contacts, make sure you're having a unique identifier field asked of everybody. email and email is the system default, but mobile phone is something that a lot of people turn on for that. So that's why these are all um included in the default fields. Moving over to form details here is where you know if you don't want say schedule for instance as the uh here let's look at the page right here we're going to be this will change the button right there when they are submitting the meeting so want to say something else and uh this right here where what does the visitor see after booking Here you can have a thank you message that is configured right there. So after they hit submit or schedule, it'll appear right here.

Drew Ross: It's nice to uh confirm that it's successfully been been booked as well as um maybe tell them some uh some next steps. But what's cool is you can also redirect them to a new page. So, um, yeah, you can send them to a thank you page if this is maybe if you want to measure conversions, you can do that. Um, or just, uh, you know, help guide them along, keep them browsing, keep them getting excited, you can do that right there, too. Automations. Uh, this is, um, this is where a lot of cool stuff can happen. So, these automations are again, they're like our signup form. So if you use those then um these will look very familiar. Each of these automations runs off of an email template that is automatically created. Like once you make thisuler a couple these two email templates are going to be added to your email template library. Uh one of them is the meeting booked. This is like the the you know thank you thanks for for scheduling a meeting with me.

Drew Ross: Um, here are the meeting details. You'll be able to see that right there. Click on this to see the the the template. And note that it it operates on merge tags like with any of our uh email templates where things are dynamically inserted. So that's where the meeting information is going to be added. And uh and then there's also a uh 1 hour before meeting reminder template that is automatically scheduled. So you have complete control over these templates. You can go in customize them to your taste. You can make copies of them. Like so if you want to make a for instance a day one day before meeting reminder then I would recommend going in copying this template modifying what it says a little bit and then you can go in here and create a meeting automation by clicking on this button right here. And again too, you have you have complete control over all of these uh automations that are sent. Like with our signup forms, you can have conditions set to them as well.

Drew Ross: So um if you if you want different messages to be sent based on a drop down and somebody's going to ask like a you know they say, "Hey, I'm I'm interested in service A versus B." Well, you can have um different emails sent based on those conditions. So, it's extremely configurable and um and also should be familiar to sign form users as well. Um, another really exciting thing that and again that that's new with thisuler enhancement is that you can have automations that that that will be stopped based on somebody filling out this uh this thisuler. So, for instance, you have a let's say let's say you you want to have um a reminder to rebook a meeting after somebody has missed a meeting with you. Well, send them a series to remind them to rebook that links to this signup to thisuler. And then you can have you can have this create automation that will um that will cancel that'll remove from series based on somebody booking a meeting. So you just say remove from series right here and then choose template.

Drew Ross: This is where you select the series template that is going to be cancelled. the one that is reminding them to uh to book a meeting. And then that way you don't accidentally have automations going haywire um you know nudging people to do things that that they've already done because that can be frustrating and confusing to them. All right. And then if you have any questions about this stuff, reach out to us. We'll be more than happy to help. the participants tab. This is going to be everybody who has scheduled a meeting with you using this uh thisuler link. Pretty straightforward stuff right there. Uh as you can see, you're able to send mass messages to these people uh just like as as a uh as a list as well if that's something that is useful for you. And then the admin tab, again, this is also right out of our uh signup forms. Um, one thing that might be a little bit confusing here is you can see, you know, this message right up here.

Drew Ross: Uh, just note that this, um, this message really is only this is not going to be relevant for most people. Um, basically if you have if you are going to be setting a a conditional autoresponder for thisuler that assigns people differently based on the responses that they give in theuler like you know to uh different users in your account. That's going to override what you set right here. Most people aren't going to be doing this. So, um you can probably just ignore that. Um what people what you might actually want to consider using here are for instance alerts to other users. Like maybe if you're a manager, you want to know when your when your sales reps are booking meetings. This is where you can configure that. And then also add signups to other contact lists. That's a really popular thing to use. Um, like if you want to automatically add people to um to your newsletter list, then you can select newsletter list here and save that right there. All right. Well, that that just about does it. So, yeah, we're really excited about this enhancement. It's a really big um it's a really big step forward in ouruler and just um having the whole system work together really nicely. I think uh with this we'll probably save a whole bunch of you um you know subscription costs on maybe like third party uhuler software. So we're always excited to do that and also hopefully giving you a whole bunch of new ways to make doing business easier.