Workflow for multiple contractors in multiple geographies

Super-helpful, appreciate the setup guidance. We’ll go through the links thoroughly & follow up as we have more questions!

Wonderful - sounds perfect!

I did also mean to tell you to look into these things/features/automations for your team as you setup: 

• Workflows (for automating reminders for invitees and hosts - more here)
• Integrations (like Zoom, for example)
• Our new Contacts feature

Let us know how it all goes! 

Hi Kelsi! Your recommended Calendly routing form/team page/round robin approach sounds ideal so far.

A few quick followup questions:

1 - annual team pricing - we can reassign seats at no charge as actual human team members come/go, yes?

2 - best way to keep contractor names somewhat private - for example, first name + last initial or just first name?

employee poaching is an issue in our industry.

We’d rather not make it easy for a competitor to essentially build a list of our entire contractor network just by walking through all the routing form branches 😎

3 - are team members (aka contractors) able to see each other’s details and freely contact each other within the Calendly environment?

if so, is there a way to limit this?

4 - In certain geos, we also offer in-person “meetup” type groups with a max capacity of, say 10 attendees - versus the 1:1 scenario I originally outlined.

How would you suggest we tweak this approach to accommodate? 

I’m thinking a different event-type, and the option to choose the in-person group upstream in the routing flow?

Any other nuances to consider on that scenario?

@Kelsi at Calendly oops, forgot to tag you above!

Hey @FieldSched - great questions, and I am definitely ready to answer them all! FYI - you don’t need to worry about directly tagging me too much. 😉 I am notified every time a user in community responds to me via internal tools we have to make sure we are on top of things, so that you don’t ever have to wait too long for our masterful, super engaging and all-around-welllll-appreciated help! Right? 🤣 😆 Right!

Okay - here goes!

1. Check out our Pricing Page  for an overview of annual vs. monthly pricing, pricing per seat/user and the different plans we have to offer. To answer this question, yes! You pay for seats, not users. You can always remove a user and add a new one to fill the seat they left vacant rather than removing the user and seat just to purchase another seat. Keep this in mind as team members inevitably come and go! You can read more about adding/removing users here. 
2. Firstly (re: privacy with names), each user will be able to choose what name they include in their Calendly account under their profile settings. I suggest telling all of your contractors to use their First Name + Last Initial or some sort of nickname appropriate for work, as this name will be displayed on their booking pages/invites sent to invitees and calendar events etc. Secondly, you can name event types (if created individually for each host) “Event Name + Host’s First Name and Last Initial” or just the first name. This is a very common method used by other owner/admins like yourself. 
3. Nope. There is not an internal comms tool (no messaging/emailing etc.) natively within Calendly, as it’s not a virtual workspace or CRM - it’s a scheduling platform! Users within your organization will be able to see the other members of their team (so whatever name is chosen/avatars/event types they are assigned to), but will not be able to view their personal profile information (where they live, phone number, email address etc.) and so on. If you’d like, you could create a free Calendly account and add yourself to a paid seat on your team before adding someone else - then explore as a user to see what the experience entails. Then, remove yourself and fill that seat again with a real team member!
4. We have a Group Event Type that allows for one host > many invitees! You can set this up on a Team Page, as an Admin Managed Event or as an individual event for yourself at any time (and other users can set up one-on-one and group events on their own in their accounts separately from whatever you assign to them in a team environment/admin managed environment - there is no way to limit them from doing this - just an FYI!). Group events sound like exactly what you are looking for in this situation. You can include them in the routing process, too. To make this work, you can set it up so that if a potential invitee says they’re in X geo location and they’d prefer to meet in person (you will be given the option to set up “and/or” logic), they are routed to the group event type for that geo location. Or, you can come up with other logic that makes more sense for your use case and in your own brain! 
5. Oops… you didn’t have five on your list - but I don’t want to delete this because I prefer odd numbers. Sooo, here’s some articles and such from our community and our Help Center (starting with Help Center) that you might find helpful in addition to all of this info! 💡
   1. Routing Forms Best Practices
   2. Let Invitees Choose Who to Meet With Using Routing Forms
   3. Calendly Routing
   4. Team FAQs
   5. User Management
   6. How to Distribute Events Round Robin to Team Members
   7. Multi-person Scheduling Options for Teams
   8. Understanding Multi-user Features: Groups, Teams and Shared Event Types
   9. Setting up and Managing Shared Events

Now, onto some super awesome community articles (I have a liiitle bias towards these for obvious reasons, but our Help Center content is honestly next-to-none as far as help centers go, as far as I am personally concerned… so this is all super great to reference lol!)

… PHEW! I know that is A LOT of content, and you certainly do not need to read it all right now. It’s all available here and in our help center annnyyy time you want or need it, but now you have what I feel is immediately relevant to your use case and questions listed here in your topic for easy reference any time, too! 

HAPPYYY READING! 📚 Let me know if you need anything along the way. I’ll be back tomorrow! 🤗

Oopsie! Adding one more (short!) note here because I briefly mentioned it and added a link or two, but didn’t explain it to you myself. 

You might also consider using groups to organize your team members (this is a different functionality than adding users to teams in order to assign them to team event types) internally. What’s bad about having more organization? 

What the heck are groups? Well…

As an account owner, admin, or group admin (you can make any single user in your organization an admin of the organization itself, or an admin of a specific group/groups - or both!), you can place members of your organization into groups.

You can use groups to:

• segment users based on department, job function, or location

• delegate control to 'group admins' to manage and report on their group

• view scheduled events and activity by group

You can also automatically provision users into groups if you are using an SSO! See more here.

To create a group, view Create a group.

Along with the info above, this should be helpful as you figure out how to set up, organize and sort your organization and it’s team members. Talk to ya later! 

Hi Kelsi! OK, after reading lots of docs 😎, still a bit unclear on groups vs teams.

Is this an either/or decision? Or can we use both, one for internal organization, one for external scheduling?

And if it’s an either/or, can you help me understand tradeoffs a bit more?

Many thanks!

Sorry for the confusion - that’s a common pain point that I’ve noticed (mentally noting that we should put out documentation outlining these features in a compare/contrast format...) - let me elaborate and answer your questions! 

Firstly - this is not an either/or situation. You can absolutely utilize both teams and groups within your Calendly organization, and with your complex use case I suggest that you do!

Now, to outline each feature (I am pulling this directly from our Help Center article, “Understanding multi-user features: groups, teams and shared event types.”)

Teams = where the scheduling happens.

When you create a team in Calendly, you create a team space for admins to control the team scheduling experience. Within this team space, admins can:

• Create and manage multi-user events (round robin and collective)
• Display events on a team landing page
• Upload a team logo

In the below example, we can see the Calendly Customer Feedback Team’s logo and landing page, where people can choose the team event that suits them best:

Expand the below section for more on teams, when to use them and how: 

Onto Groups!

Groups = people administration made easy.

With groups, you can organize, manage, and report on everyone using Calendly in your organization.

Expand the below section for more on Groups, when to use them and how: 

You can head to the article linked above to read more.

We also 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.  If you'd like a more thorough breakdown of the team features, check out this recording that walks through the basics of using Calendly with your team. 

All of that would be done with Teams - to set up actual scheduling. Then, you can bring Groups into the mix to organize more internally. 

Paired with the resources I provided to you in my earlier comments (and now with the ability to make more sense of Teams vs Groups and how they can both benefit you), I think you’ll probably have all that you need - but please let me know if you don’t! I’ll be here. 😉