As part of the 22.5.1 May release, a new concept for Calendar Capacity has been built along with the ability for a sales person to send a Calendar Event invitation that the customer is able to select their own date and time for.
Provisioning An Account
Role Management
To enable this function on an account the Web Forms role will need to be applied. This Role will allow users to be able to create the Invitation types that can be sent to customers through the Web Forms setting
Creating Invitation Options
Managers set up in the Web Forms role are then able to create new Invitations
Settings > Sales Pipeline Settings > Web Forms
Name - A Name for the Invitation Type
Type - Calendar Event
Calendar Event Type - Choose what Event this will create on the lead
Calendar Event Duration - This is to allocate a block of time for these types of appointments
Status - There are three options Public (active), Draft (not visible or active), Disabled (not visible or active)
Yards - Select which yards have access to these invitations
My Company (or Yard) Settings
A new section has been added to the Business Hours accordion that allows the location to set the below
Appt. Start - Earliest time an appointment can be booked
Appt. End - Latest time an appointment can finish
Max. Appt - Maximum number of Customer selected appointments, per person per day
The order these settings execute in is Yard level first, then Company Level.
Using Calendar Invites
Once the account has been provisioned this will now give access to all users in the account to use the invitations from leads that qualify to yards set in the Web Forms configuration.
Two new options will appear under the calendar icon within a lead (SMS will be available to the accounts that have the SMS Gateway service enabled)
The sales person is then presented with a pop up to allow them to choose the correct Invitation, edit the recipients details if required, and also the message sent to them. Standard Text is available here so that the messages sent out can be consistent across the dealership.
Once sent a placeholder event is shown in the Next Actions section on the Lead Detail page. This does not have a time or date placed against it so does not affect the calendar in this state. This also has a 'Pending' message attached, and the icon has a exclamation mark.
The Customer gets sent either an Email or SMS that contains a link to a calendar, here they are able to select from the available times of the sales person assigned the lead. This availability and suggested times are generated by looking at
- The users existing calendar events
- The users RDOs
- The earliest appointment time (Yard/Company)
- The latest appointment finish time (Yard/Company)
- The maximum Customer driven appointments per day
Upon submission the Customer gets a confirmation screen and the ability to add the event to their calendar of choice
The sales person can also get a confirmation notification that the customer has selected a time and date, and the Next Action is updated to an event within the Lead Detail Screen