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Once again got an email from a client who signed up using my Calendly link and never received the call-in information email afterwards. I'm so surprised that Calendly seems to work great for everyone and it hardly works for me at all, so I wonder if you could let me know what I am doing wrong. Here's the deal:

My Calendly is hooked up with Google Calendar, and from my POV it all works great and people's appointments pop up on my calendar automatically. My google calendar uses my own domain if that’s relevant.

HOWEVER, after using it for about half a year, I'd say 40% of the people who make an appointment on my Calendly link don't receive the email confirmation (it lands in their spam, or they never get it at all). The result is, they think their job is done (since they used my link), forget about it, the invite pops up on my calendar and I sit there and nobody joins the call. When I ask why they didn't join, the answer is "I never got the call information" and they reschedule, and still say they did not receive an invite. In the end, the only way for me to make it work with many of these folks is by “converting” the invite that pops up on my calendar into a standard Gcal invite (by manually editing it and adding their email address), then they receive it. Needless to say, very tedious. I have considered making it a habit to "convert" all my Calendly generated invites into Google invites at the end of the day, BUT that ends up confusing those who DID get the original Calendly invite (because they now get 2 invites, and then they cancel one because it bothers them, which shows up as a cancelation on my end, although they didn't really want to cancel). Again, so tedious and everyone ends up being confused!

The other scenario is, of those remaining who book a time through my Calendly link and DO get an invite, they assume it will pop up on their calendars automatically (as other invites apparently do), so they see the email, don't do anything about it, and guess what, the Calendly invite never automatically syncs to their calendars, so they miss it. The second time when they realize this, they manually enter the invite into their calendar, but again, so tedious!

I'm so confused what I am doing wrong here since everyone speaks so highly about Calendly and I really want it to work, but I am so frustrated about the amount of time I have wasted waiting for someone who didn't even have me on the radar anymore... any thoughts? Obviously, I guess at the end of the day it is related to them granting permissions so that Calendly has access to their calendar, but am I expected to convince every stranger to enable Calendly and set up syncing just for being able to talk to me? Yet, Calendly seems so popular, that I am wondering if I am doing something wrong? Thanks for any leads you might have!

 

PS: I did see this text below, and my account is set up for ‘calendar invitations’, yet people tell me it’s either not on their calendar/ they did not receive an email/ the email didn’t sync to their calendars. If it were for a few people only, I’d say that’s just unfortunate, but more than half of the people who book a time encounter one problem or the other.

  1. With Email Confirmations, Calendly sends the invitee an email notification from notifications@calendly.com and has a reply-to address that's associated with your Calendly login email. You can modify this on Account Settings page.
  2. With Calendar Invitations, your connected calendar sends the invitee a notification of the booked meeting which has a reply-to address that's associated with your Add to calendar email on your Calendar Connection page.

As a follow up: I tried booking an invite using my own link, and noticed that the email that sends out the invite is notifications@calendly.com For me that was not an issue, I received the email in my inbox, and it showed on my calendar without any problems. But I used a personal email account that doesn’t have any firewall blockers or spam blockers installed. I wonder whether other corporate email accounts might consider the calendly domain spam and that is the issue after all? Please help!

Hi @rockbottom,

 

That does sound very frustrating and we do see this happening from time to time but almost never at the frequency you are describing. Generally, this happens when an invitee is receiving an email from notifications@calendly.com for the very first time, and if they mark it as “safe” it will not happen again. I know that is a very tedious solution.

Alternatively, you could add sentence in the description on your booking page, something to the effect of ‘after booking please check you inbox for this meeting invite, if you don’t see an invite check your spam filter.’ If you want to be even more aggressive about it you could use a Routing Form that contains a yes/no question before booking and ask that your invitee understands how the whole thing works. Unfortunately, if you have customers from orgs with very very stringent firewall settings there is little we can do on our end to get around that. I’m sorry you are having so many missed meetings and I hope this helps. 

 

Getting started with Routing Forms

@Sean Marlin thank you for your reply.

May I follow up with two direct questions?

  1. I have double checked and in settings it says that I have ‘calendar invitations’ on. At the very beginning I had ‘email invitations’ enabled. In your experience does this make a difference to mitigate my problems?
  2. I tried checking everywhere but couldn’t find a way for those confirmations to be sent from my own domain, instead of the notifications@calendly.com - are you aware of a way to do that? I assume that might solve the issue.

I do what you suggest all the time, I say to watch out for the invite, and that it might be caught up in a spam folder, but people just don’t think about it after booking, they assume it will pop up on their calendar. The other issue with many of the people who want to book is that their admin places the request on their behalf (as in, admin enters their boss’ email address), and admin thinks that will trigger it popping up on their boss’ calendar/ their inbox, but it doesn’t. And you see how the result is that I am waiting there at the booked time, then I email the boss (who has no clue this was booked), and the admin gets an email what they did wrong causing this confusion… unfortuntately most of my meetings are one-off meetings/ or once-a-year, so there is not much of a teaching curve I can rely upon. I’m not exaggerating, at least half of my calls don’t take place because of this issue, any information you might have to address 1. or 2. above would help me greatly. Thank you.

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