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Some time ago, I inquired about the possibility of creating a more suitable calendar for retail stores. To clarify the issue, I'll outline an example below:

 

Wedding & Party Department – Number of fitting rooms and therefore fitting options: 6 

Gala Department – Number of fitting rooms and therefore fitting options: 4 

Mother of the Bride/Groom Department – Number of fitting rooms and therefore fitting options: 3

 

The current issue is that while I can open a calendar for each department, if a customer schedules a gala appointment at, for example, 10:00 AM, the system won't allow a mother of the bride or groom to book an appointment at the same time because your system assumes these are the same departments. I find this quite strange, and I imagine other businesses may face similar issues. Could you please look into this? I am otherwise very satisfied with Calendly and would prefer not to switch to another service, but this limitation is costing us revenue as we want each department to be treated separately, allowing a set number of people to schedule appointments for each department.

 

I really hope you can resolve this.

Hi @Dresses24752,

 

I appreciate the administrative heft of your project. While Calendly isn’t designed with one type of business in mind I think we can use the tools available to build something that might work for you. One thing I will say upfront is that it would be easier to use a separate calendar for each department rather than one. That said, Collective, Group, and Round Robin events will be your best friends here. The inherent problem is that Calendly has to differentiate between a booked, and thus unavailable, meeting vs. multiple openings at a time. We have options though.

  • The simplest suggestion, which doesn’t require separate calendars, is to create a different event type for each room. Yes, that means you would have to set up 13 event types. If it were me, I would name each event type by the department and room number. In this scenario you would need to also use the Book Over meetings feature and tell each meeting to ignore other meetings from other rooms. The complexity of juggling 13 potential meetings at any given time is why having three different calendars is preferred but you can certainly do it with one. The next thing to think about is how to help your customers navigate to the right department and you would do this via Routing Forms and Routing Logic. Routing Forms are basically screener questions that then ‘route’ your customer to the desired event type. 
  • A second approach would be to structure each department availability through Group events. In Group events you can set a max number of attendees. In this scenario your max number of attendees would be total rooms. So, for the ‘Wedding & Party Department’ you would allow a total of six attendees per group event. Again, you would want to use a screener question and Routing Logic to help navigate your customers to the right department (event type). This would also be a good place to ask them other question you need information about before their session. One caveat here, in this scenario each department would have a more rigid time structure based on availability. You wouldn’t have the option of rolling meeting times for each room the way you would if you set up 13 individual events. On the other hand, with Group events you would have the ability to create Round Robin events to make sure you have enough staff coverage for each department and you’d have fewer events to manage. 

I hope this gets you going in the right direction. I’m leaving some resources below about Group events, Collective events, Routing Logic, Book Over meetings, and Round Robins.

 

Event types overview

Group event types

Create a Collective event for your team

Getting started with Routing Forms & Routing Forms Best Practices

Book over meetings

How to Set Up a Round Robin Team Event

 


Thank you so much for your reply. I'm going to try some options out to see if I completely understand it and if it works as you mentioned. :)

 

If it doesn't work I will come back here. But once again, thanks for the help so far, it sounds good!


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