Future-focused Inquiry About Campaign Workflows and AI Assistant for Booking

Hi ​@mhohenberg - Thanks for reaching out on this.

This is a request we’ve gotten a few times before, so I’ve gone ahead and passed it over to our product team to review. Right now, I do know a lot of users utilize the MailChimp integration for email campaigns. But having something built-in would be cool to see. You can read more about the Mailchimp integration here: https://calendly.com/integration/mailchimp

I haven’t heard much on this, but I’d like to hear more from your perspective. What are some things you’d like to see in a Calendly AI Assistance in the future? What kind of features would you like it to have? Let me know! I can pass it along to our product team directly from there.

Thank you!

Hi David!

Thank you for getting back to me!

Ideally, I would love to keep my operations within Calendly to avoid any confusion for my prospects. It’s been a game-changer for my business, and I’d love to further streamline my processes within the platform.

Here’s what I’m hoping to see: a campaign workflow feature. Currently, I manually send 5 emails and 5 texts over 7-10 days to each prospect who opts in to receive communication, with different messages for each. If 10 leads come in during the day, I manually send individual emails and texts to each one, then move on to the messages for those I contacted the day before. This continues until all leads have received their 5 emails and 5 texts. It’s cumbersome, especially when processing 200-300 leads a month, but it’s still more efficient than just calling each lead.

Calendly has already helped me grow my business by 300% over the years by eliminating phone tag and allowing me to manually manage campaign messaging that keeps my schedule full. I rarely set appointments manually anymore...maybe once in a blue moon. However, if I could input a name, email, and phone number, and set up an AI-assisted campaign to automatically send those emails and texts, it would save me an immense amount of time and effort. I’m sure many others would find a simple feature like this incredibly helpful.

I don’t necessarily need an AI component to start...just the ability to automate the emailing and texting would be a huge productivity boost. But an AI assistant could take it even further. For example, if it could handle basic questions (trained with corporate-approved responses), assist less tech-savvy users by suggesting available appointment times via text or email, and then automatically book the appointment, so the prospect doesn’t have to click the link and follow instructions...that would be revolutionary!

I’d love to see this built into Calendly rather than using an outside service to avoid adding more platforms and reducing the number of contacts my prospects have to manage. I’m currently being approached by several AI companies offering similar solutions, but keeping everything streamlined within Calendly would be my preferred option to avoid issues and confusion with client communications.

Thanks again for considering my input. I look forward to hearing more from your product team!

Best regards,
Michael 

Hey ​@mhohenberg - Really appreciate all the information here! 

Just to confirm before I send all of this over - You’re working with pre-booking leads, is that correct? Essentially you’re wanting to have leads be added to Calendly, then any new leads that are added get a list of automated emails and texts (Like our Workflows feature) is that correct?

Then, any leads that end up booking get their standard post booking workflows, is that right?

Let me know! Just want to make sure I have everything correct on my end. 😀

Yes, if by "pre-booking leads" you mean leads that have inquired about our services and opted in to receive calls, texts, and emails from us but haven’t been contacted yet, then that’s exactly what I mean.

Let’s say I get 5 new leads today. I’ll call them one by one, and if someone answers, great! No need for Calendly since I can start the consultation immediately if they have the time right then or set an appointment directly if they don’t. However, if they don’t answer, I’d love the ability to enter their name, email, and phone number into a campaign that takes over from there to get them booked on my calendar. Currently, if they don’t pick up, I leave a voicemail saying I’ll be texting and emailing them a link to my calendar to avoid phone tag. But the next day, I’m back to square one with all my lead calls, and I have to repeat the process all over again by manually sending emails and texts with the Calendly link. This happens with 5 messages with the Calendly link that are manually sent by email and text over the next 7 to 10 days.

If I could free myself from manually sending texts and emails that contain the opportunity to book through the Calendly link to leads who don’t answer, and have a workflow do it for me, that would be incredible. Additionally, if an AI assistant could answer basic questions it’s trained on and also book appointments directly through casual text/email chat, that would be even more outstanding because I could say in my voice message to the prospect that I’m going to turn over communication with my assistant to help them get on my calendar so we can speak. It would allow real-time handling of inquiries, rather than waiting until I can get to it between calls.

This scenario will allow me to call sweep my leads to see who I can catch while a workflow and/or AI assistant can do the heavy lifting to keep my calendar full, and keeping my invite to connect top of mind for them in an automated fashion. This would leave me to do more of what I do best. 

I hope that clarifies things!

Okay this is perfect, thank you so much ​@mhohenberg - I’ll get this over to my team to review, hopefully we can see something like this in the future!