Learn About The Advanced Settings In The Google Calendar Integration
The Google Calendar app offers an array of advanced features so that scheduling can be tailored to the needs of your business. For example, you may want the operators to book more than 1 appointment per time slot, or you might want us to send appointment confirmation emails to your customers.
In this article we'll discuss:
- Appointment Padding - With appointment padding, you can include "buffer time" between appointments so that you'll have some time to regroup before your next customer arrives!
- Multiple Bookings - With this feature, we can book up to 9 appointments per time slot.
- Cancellation Limits - When it comes to canceling appointments, you can set a limit so that customers are not able to cancel within a certain time frame prior to the appointment.
- Check for Conflicts - Selecting this feature will allow the system to check for conflicting appointment slots scheduled in your other calendar layers.
- Saving the Google Calendar Settings - Once you've completed your setup, you'll need to save the configuration.
In order to activate the Advanced settings section of the Google Calendar app, click the Advanced tab within your Google Calendar. The full menu of features will be displayed below.
Appointment Padding
Appointment padding gives you time in between each appointment so that you can relax a while before heading to your next customer.
If you'd like appointment padding to be displayed in a separate Color on your calendar, just click on any of the colored squares to the right of the padding time.
If padding is active, you'll need to set your Limitation to Unlimited. In addition, the time you select for padding must be equal to your appointment Frequency, or the duration of each appointment. If either of these is not set correctly, you'll see the pop-up below when you try to save.
Booking Multiple Services
If you've activated Services in your Google calendar app, then you can also activate Multiple Services, which will allow SAS agents to schedule multiple services simultaneously. For example, let's say that a medical practice has 5 doctors available for daily appointments. You would select 5 as the Number of appointments per slot, and the operators could schedule 5 patients based on your Frequency or Service.
To activate this feature, switch the Multiple Bookings toggle, and choose from the dropdown list how many bookings we can schedule within 1 time slot.
When the operators schedule on your calendar, they will be able to check off multiple services, and it will block the combined length of time for the appointment.
Cancellation Limits
If your scheduling policy does not allow cancellations within a certain time frame prior to the appointment, you'll want to set your Cancellation limit. This will prevent the operators from being able to cancel an appointment on your calendar if it falls within the limit you set.
First, use the drop down list to select minutes, hours or days.
Then, enter a number into the box to the right of Cannot cancel up to. In the example below, callers will not be able to cancel if they are calling within 2 days of their scheduled appointment.
If you have multiple layers configured within your Google Calendar, you may want to use the Check for Conflicts advanced feature. Selecting this feature will allow the system to check for conflicting appointment slots scheduled in your other calendar layers, so that appointments don't overlap.
Save Configuration
Once you've completed the Advanced settings section, in addition to the basic setup, click the blue Save button in the bottom left corner of the Google Calendar app.
Now it’s time to integrate Google Calendar into your script!
In the Google Calendar script block of your choosing, go to the Options tab. Then, from the Google Calendar Layer drop down, select your configuration.
3. When you are done, click Save.
If you were simply editing a script block that was already added to a script, you’re all done! If not, you’ll need to create the rest of your script blocks (if applicable), your script sections, and your script. Check out these articles for instructions: