Hey Google users, welcome back. This is Goldy and in this video I'll show you Google's newly launched functionality in Google Calendar that will help you create a beautiful looking booking page where your customers or, vendors or any external party can book your time.

So it might be helpful, especially if you run a small business where instead of going back and forth on the phone, you can just send the link to your customers or prospective customers and let them book your time seamlessly.

Okay, so first I'll show you my couple of slides so that you understand the basics behind it and then I will show you the step by step demonstration of how to set that up.

Okay, so this is the kind of page that you will end up creating.It looks beautiful and your customers can then select the windows or the slots that you make available for them.

Now before I show you the demonstration, couple of quick Settings You might have already used appointment Slots functionality in Google Calendar past. What differentiates this newly launched feature called Appointment Scheduling is that appointment slots are more geared towards internal use cases.

So maybe if you're a teacher and you want to give your students appointments lots so that they can come and book your time, that's fine. But what if you want to give the same functionality but to external parties like your prospective customers or existing customers? For those external use cases, appointment scheduling would be perfect.

Now before I show you the demonstration, just a quick thing on logistics appointment scheduling feature is available in following editions. So if you have Google Workspace till the time you're running Business Standard Plus or Enterprise Standard Plus, you're all set Google Workspace Education.

There are additions listed which you must have in case if you need this functionality it is not available to search in Google Workspace and legacy G Suite business and basic customers. Also very important in case if you are still using Personal Gmail account which ends up in@gmail.com this is not available by default.

However, you can consider upgrading to a new plan that's called Google Workspace individual. our dedicated video, I'll link it somewhere and once you upgrade it's a paid plan, then you should be able to leverage this appointment scheduling feature.

Okay, so with that let me share my screen and show you how to set that up step by step. Okay, so I'm in my Gmail, I'll click on this app launcher and I will go to Google Calendar.

Once I'm in Google Calendar, I'll click on Create.Under the drop down you will see this new feature called Appointment Schedule Click on that.

Once you click let's give the title which your customers will see when they try to book you. So I'll put Google Workspace consultation. Okay, now you can choose the duration of this meeting. For me, 30 minutes is fine but in case if you need to make it 1545, whatever. You can do that from here.

Click on that and once you click let's give the title which your customers will see when they try to book you. So I'll put Google Workspace consultation. Okay, now you can choose the duration of this meeting. For me, 30 minutes is fine but in case if you need to make it 1545, whatever. You can do that from here.

Okay and then general availability means on which days and for which time slots you want your customers to be booked. So Saturday, Sunday unavailable. If I want, I can make them available, but I don't want to do that.

So for now I'll say I'm available. Let's say every day between it's a 30 minutes slot. In your case, if you're into sales, you may make it a full day too. And then instead of doing it one by one from Monday to Friday, I can just click on this one which will copy that slot to all of these. Or you can just go to the specific day. So I'll click on copy time to all.

Now I'm available three to 330 Monday to Friday for this. Okay. Now let's talk about some other options available here. Scheduling window which will limit the time range during which appointment slots can be booked.

So you can either say that I'm available now or you can make it start and end date. Maybe you are running a sales campaign which will start from let's say 1 May and it will end on May 31. You can only do these appointments schedules available for that one specific month by mentioning start and end dates.

I want to make it available now and then you can also define the maximum time in advance that our appointment slots can be booked.

For example, how in advance these people can book you. So 60 days is fine.

But in case if you need to increase or decrease, you can certainly do that.

If you just Uncheck it, that means you're not defining it and it's like indefinite. Okay So customers can book you maybe an hour in advance.

For me, I'll go with default 60 now the minimum time before the appointment start that it can be booked.

So if you do not want somebody to just come today at 230 and book appointment for 03:00 P.m. In my case, you can mention the kind of time you need in advance to prepare for that.

So if it's 12 hours for you, fine. If not, you can increase or decrease it. If you Uncheck it, then that means you're just opening it for everything. Okay. After that you have adjusted availability which says indicate times and specific dates when you are available, which is not my case.

But if it's yours, you can go ahead and put those specific dates in my case, it's like indefinite.

Now booking Appointment Settings When I click on this drop down, you will see a few things. Number one, buffer time. In my case, I just provided 30 minutes slot every day. So that might not make sense. But let's say if you're a salesperson or maybe if you're a consultant offering consulting slots.

If you're offering, let's say three hour slots every single day, maybe six slots, you want to have some buffer time in between those slots to avoid kind of back to back calls and for that you can define the buffer time so that nobody can book you right after one to another call.

Similarly, you can also have maximum bookings per day. Let's say if you are making your calendar available Monday to Friday, full day or the whole day, then you can say 30 minutes, but maximum four calls can be scheduled every day. In my case, I'm just offering 30 minutes lot so I'll Uncheck it.

Once you are done with these settings, you will click on next and then you will do some settings specific to you, how your booking page will look and what information pieces will it collect.

So here by default it's picking up my photograph and my name for my Google account profile. In case if you need to change it, you can click here and you should be able to change that.

second thing is the location of the meeting in case if you are offering this meeting in your office or maybe in Starbucks somewhere, you can enter in person meeting and then you can add the address of that location in case if it will be a phone call, you can Select Phone Call where the person who is booking you will put his or her phone number so that you can call them in case if you do not want to specify anything for now, you can select this one.

In my case, I'll do the video consultation. So I'll Select Google Meet Video Conferencing which will add a video conference URL in the calendar.

Okay, now it's time to put some description under description. Obviously you can format it, you can add attachments if you want. So I'll say this and cost. First consultation is free and I'll just do bullet points here.

You can add whatever you want and then let's talk about the booking form itself which will be filled by the customer or whoever is booking you. Now, first name, last name and email address. They are like nonadjustable fields. You can't delete them, you can't change them as you see here, but the phone number. You can either remove it if you don't need it

You can edit it to say whether it's required or optional. But what if you need more information from your customers based on the business that you're on? In my case, let's say if I'm doing Google Workspace consultation, I need to check whether the person who's booking me is Google Super Admin or not.

I'm just making it up. I don't know. You get the idea, right? So I'll say, are you a Google Workspace Super Admin? You can come up with your own questions based on your business and then you can make them required or optional.

I'll make it required so that they must answer it to book me and I'll click Add Item and you can't add any more items for now. So be cautious.

Now let's talk about the booking confirmation and reminders. So I'll click on that and here when they book you they will be sent an email. Reminder email will come to you too and here you can check whether they should keep getting reminders or not get reminder at all.

In my case I would say I should send I'll go for custom for the first one because I want one email to be sent to them. Let's say three days before the meeting coming up and then one more which should go down a day before and the final one which should go to them 1 hour before these people to attend and then I'll click on Save.

As soon as I do that my appointment scheduling booking page is ready. As you see here it says Open booking page or I can click here and I can copy the booking page URL. I'm going to copy this now. I will act as a customer who is booking it. Assume that I might have sent this person a booking page URL in my email signature or I'll show you bonus tip too in a minute.

So I'll go to Incognito window. As a customer I click on this URL and this is where I'll be landing. And as you see you have the photograph and your name here and the meeting title and this is what you put in the description. 30 minutes long Google Meet conference.

So as you see, no more appointment scheduling options are available other than the one that I chose.

So I'll go with let's say Tuesday 03:00 p.m and this is the experience that your customers will get. So they will put their name and then I'm going to put my email address here to show you what happens when they fill up the form phone number are you a Google Workspace Admin? This was our custom field. So I'll say yes and I'll click on book.

Okay, it says Booking confirmed, everything is all set and if I need to cancel I can go and cancel it. I'll close it for now because my meeting is booked.

I'll now go to my email and as you see I got an email saying my Google appointment slot or appointment scheduling is done and it is booked by Mr. Ok ok who says under Google Workspace Super Admin. So this was your customer experience .

If I go to my Google calendar now, I will also see that this is booked for Tuesday fifth. When I click on that it provides me all the details. Okay, I can cancel or send a message on this email if I need to convey something else.

Okay, so now it's a time to share a bonus tip. I'm confident you will find it useful. So by default you have this long URL that you will need to convey to your customers or whoever wants to book you.

Of course you can write a small text and add this link which will work but we can make it better and let me show you how. So in case if you have your own domain so for example I have my domain which is called goldyarora.com and I want to customize my URLs for example I want to call it consult with goldy. Goldyarora.com in your case.

In case if you have multiple people working for your business you may come with consult with Mark, consult with Jason, consult with Ram Shaam or whatever your Domain.com and then give this URL to these people so that they can add that in their email signature or they can simply when they're meeting somebody they need to convey it.

They can simply say well you can go to consult with Goldy.Goldyarora.com and feel free to schedule some time. Doing this is pretty easy. Step one, just copy the Google calendar appointment booking page that you got from Google calendar. Step two, log into your DNS wherever you have your name servers pointed okay and then go to that place and create a new CNAME record.

Whenever you create a CNAME in your DNS it will ask you for two pieces of information. First is the record host name. The host name will be whatever you're putting before your domain name. So for me it's consult with Goldy in case for you if it's just book me or something just put that here in the host name in the value you will be putting your calendar booking page URL to save it within a few minutes or a few hours depending on your DNS, TTL or some technical stuff.

Just leave it for now but within 24 hours usually you will be able to share this with your customers. Anybody can go to consult with Goldy, goldy.com or whatever URL that you came up with and they will land on that beautifully looking page to book you. I hope this might have been helpful.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback do not hesitate to put that under this video and I'll be happy to collaborate with that.

Thank you so much, bye.

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