Appointment Planner
Schedule one-on-one appointments in your private calendar
Last updated
DialoX Manual
Schedule one-on-one appointments in your private calendar
Last updated
Introduction
The Appointment Planner allows you to have customers schedule appointments directly into your own personal calendar, for example a Google or Outlook calendar.
The app requires you to have at least one of the following channels:
Chatwidget Can be embedded on your website Chatwidget
PWA Can be hosted on a bsqd.me subdomain Progressive Web App (PWA)
The Appointment Planner comes with a predefined calendar and planner.
The only thing left for you to do is to link your personal calendar and create availability slots, in which people can schedule their appointment.
Link your Calendar
Go to "Settings - Calendars", and click on the Edit (✏️) button for the existing calendar.
From there you can change the Data source of the calendar:
When choosing for Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, click the "Connect to .." button.
You will be shown a login screen if not yet logged in at Google or Microsoft.
After choosing the correct account, you need to grant the application access to your account, so it can create the appointments in your calendar:
Then choose the correct calendar, in which the appointments will be made:
Create availability slots
Go to "Planning" in the left menu.
Click and drag somewhere on the calendar view to create an availability slot. Optionally you can make the slot recurring, saving you from having to create the same slot every week.
The planner can be configured with the following settings:
Planning title A name for you to recognise the right planner.
Create a note For appointments to be visible in your external calendar, this option should be left unchecked. If you leave this option unchecked, they will not show up in the 'Notes' view, but they will show up in your external calendar.
Appointments are exported to your external calendar via the iCal protocol. When they're created as notes, they will be exported as VTODO's instead of VEVENT's.
Most calendars only show VEVENT's in the calendar view, so it's best to leave this option unchecked.
Day limit Use this to limit how many days ahead customers can schedule their appointment
Minutes from now How many minutes need to be between the time of making the appointment and the start of the booking itself. This prevents customers from booking appointments that start in 5 minutes.
Free/busy or Slots The free/busy search strategy attempts to find gaps in the calendar that haven't been filled yet. As a result, events will not overlap. Free/busy can work with multiple calendars to find the first one that has an open spot.
Free/busy requires availability slots which determine the hours within which to search for an open spot (for example, your opening hours).
For scheduling one-on-one appointments, we strongly recommend to use the "Free/busy" strategy.
Operator To reply to inbox channels
Planner To manage the calendar and planners
The playbook is set up with an opening message and two flow files.
The Appointment flow handles the scheduling of the appointment.
The Request details flow is invoked after finding a slot for the appointment. It's used to elicit any information from the user to create the appointment, such as their name, email, reason for the appointment.
The Plan node is responsible for having the dialog with the user to elicit the right date and time to make the appointment.
Once the date and time are selected, the plan node will fire the Request details flow for gathering the details needed to making the appointment, which are in this case asking for the name, email and the reason for the appointment:
When the details flow is finished, the appointment will be created in the configured calendar.
The app will determine the language of the user based on their phone number. The app falls back on the default language of the app in case the language cannot be determined (e.g. French or Dutch in Belgium).
It's possible to add an "Ask: Language" node to allow users to switch to their preferred language.
The office hours have no effect on this app.
