Hi, we are thinking about using Calendly for the website of our spa business. I have played around with the free version a little bit and so far I like it.
We have two slightly different usecases for it, but we only want to use the inline embed functionality (on a wordpress site). Here are the use cases:
On each service landing page, we would like to embed the calendar (i.e. the event type landing page, or whatever it’s called).
We also have a dedicated booking page which basically has again all services listed plus the booking calendar for all of them.
We would be fine to just embed all event types as single items for both cases (as I’m not so sure whether the actual booking landing page is really helping us in terms of UX etc.).
Now the questions:
We have various service providers with various availabilities providing our services. The customers should be free to either see just all availabilities for an individual services (i.e. availability of all personnel providing this service) or to select a single service provider and see their availability. Is that possible in the paid version (with multiple “seats”)? Can I check out a demo of that somewhere?
In the paid version, can you also change the text within the booking calendar itself (e.g. “Choose your date and time” or whatever)?
Related to question two: Is it possible to just show the service information, but not the “host”? If I currently embed the booking form (with only one seat) it shows the name of the host on top of the form (which obviously is different with multiple host, and it would be great to see how exactly that would look like).
I would hope there are some demos of this - could you please point me at them?
Thank you very much.
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Hey there @B.72731 - welcome to Calendly, and thanks for your post! These are great questions. Let’s dig in!
Your best bet here is going to be to set up a team page and then a Round Robin Event Type for each service offered. This will allow you to add all hosts that provide a service to one event type together, and each will input their availability. Then, the invitees booking that service will be assigned whichever host is next in line to be booked and available. Click on the Round Robin link to learn more!
At this time, verbiage on the booking page cannot be customized on any plan. I’m sorry!
Yes! If you use a Round Robin ET like I went over above, this is automatic. No host information will show. Instead, it will display the avatar you choose for the team and the event type name. Invitees will not know that there are multiple hosts assigned to the event type, just the event that they are booking.
We have plenty of resources for you to learn about creating a team and setting up team events! The first step is adding your desired team members to your account from your Admin Management page. Then, you can set up a team page. Your team page will have all of your events specific to that team: round robin or collective.
Round Robin events will allow your invitees to book an appointment at any time at least one assigned team member is available. Collective events allow invitees to book an appointment when all assigned team members are available. You can also take advantage of Admin Managed Events and Shared Event Types! Click all of the hyperlinks to learn ore about each of these features. Keep in mind: you cannot create a true one-on-one ET on a team page, but you can use a Round Robin or Collective event as a one-on-one. Read more here.
If you'd like a more thorough breakdown of the team features, check out this recording (a demo, like you asked for!) that walks through the basics of using Calendly with your team.
I’d also like to go over one more thing, regarding your first paragraph!
When it comes to embedding multiple booking pages on your website, things can get a little tricky. You are free to do this of course - many do! Something else you might want to consider to simplify this is routing. Routing forms let you request information such as industry, company size, specific interests, etc. from website visitors and automatically direct them to a specific scheduling or web page based on their responses. It's great for screening and qualifying sales leads on a website or matching clients or students to the booking page of the right subject-matter expert based on their interests, program, or other criteria. You can read more about setting up routing forms, here!
With your use case, you could do something like:
creat a routing form
on the form, ask a question like, “which service are you booking today?” with all options available to choose from
set up the routing logic to send the invitee to an event type created for the service selected
the invitee will then be directed to that event type and book from there
You can learn more about routing at the linked Help Center article above by clicking the hyperlinked “here” as well as below:
Shew. That’s a lot of info to get you going. Let me know if you need more help, and enjoy exploring! 🗺
Thanks for this very extensive answer.
I understood from customer support that it's not possible with any plan, any service type, any work around to allow customers to select hosts - which obviously absolutely kills the case to use Calendly for any service business where host/customer relationships matter.
Have cancelled my subscription, hope I will get a refund.
Thanks anyway.
Hey @B.72731 - I’m so sorry for your frustration - but I can say that’s not actually true!
Using routing forms, like I went over above, you absolutely can allow invitees to select the host they’d prefer. I apologize for not understanding that was part of your goal. I thought that you intended to hide the fact that there were multiple hosts.
You can always create an event type for each host, including the host’s name in the title, and share the booking link for the team page. That will allow invitees to select the host they’d prefer. You can also streamline this process with routing forms.
Using routing forms for this goal would look like:
setting up a routing form
creating an event type for each host
asking a question like, “which host would you prefer to book with today?”
including options to select any of the assigned hosts
using routing logic to send the invitee to the event type that host is assigned to
I know it’s a workaround - but it does work it’s way around to your goal!
If this still doesn’t work for you I completely understand.
I hope you have a better day!
Thanks Kelsi, my frustration might sound worse than it is.
Ok, I understand what you are saying about routing forms, but I guess that wouldn’t be optimal for UX (optimal for UX would be if there would be a calendar showing dates, and there would be a dropdown where customers can select a specific host or leave it at “any” or whatever). If I find a couple of spare hours to go through the process of setting this up, I might give it a try (but it’s an unlikely scenario).
I was just surprised to learn that this just isn’t a thing for Calendly, but I guess it’s intended to be used for other cases than ours (anything where customers don’t care whom they are going to talk to/be helped by/treated by).
My day is awesome, I hope yours as well!
Hey again @B.72731 - thanks for your response!
It’s just that the setup is different than what you are looking for. In most cases, each user is going to have their own event types of which they are the host. That means the customer (in this type of scenario) would know that they’re booking with said host.
When it comes to a team environment, that can be the same -- you just have to set it up a bit differently (one event type for each host). Round Robin Event Types at their core are meant to provide a way for a team to take bookings in “fairness” (read about RRET distribution here), so that the bookings go one-by-one from host to host and no host is ever too many meetings ahead of the rest, for example. They also allow for an event to be booked when one or some hosts aren’t available as long as other hosts are. So, people use this type of event when they want invitees to book but it doesn’t matter whom with -- the invitees know no difference, just that they are booking the event. There is no way to use this type of event to allow invitees to select their host because that’s not what the event type was designed for.
However, using Round Robin ETs as makeshift one-on-one ETs and allowing invitees to choose is very doable, and you don’t even have to implement routing forms. That’s just a suggestion!
You can, instead, simply create those “makeshift one-on-one” ETs using RRETs (read how here) and then share the link to the team booking page (or embed the team booking page on your website). A team booking page looks something like this (from my staging account):
Now, in this example, all of these classes are being hosted by one person at different times. However, in your scenario you’d assign a different host to each of the six events and add the host’s name to the title, i.e. “Draw with Charcoal | Virtual | Samantha”, and invitees would select the event with the host they desire. You can embed this booking page on your website.
Alternatively, you can create the routing form I mentioned above, and embed that on your website. This makes it so that, rather than viewing all event types with all hosts listed on a team booking page, an invitee views a question like “which host would you like to book with?” and selects the host, followed by, “what service would you like to book?” and selects the service, next being auto-routed to the appropriate event type.
If you create an event type for each service for each host, then that will work as well.
You have options! If none of this works for you I totally get it, but I did want you to have all of the info. I am also including an article about team pages, below:
So there you have it! I am glad you are having a wonderful day so far and hope that continues to be the case. Let me know if you have any questions!
