Appointments - The What and How-to for Event Admins
An overview on using Appointments for business meetings with customers, attendees and companies
Develop better relationships with your customers with Cadence.
Put the emphasis back on building relationships with your customers, not organizing schedules. Appointments make scheduling large meetings (1:1 or a group setting) a breeze for both your team and, more importantly, your customer. Align all stakeholders across your organization with unprecedented visibility, collaboration, and communication for all your event’s customer engagements.
More about this Feature
SMART SCHEDULING:
Instantly view employee and customer availability based upon existing appointments, congress schedules, and internal meetings.
- People's Availability - Easily find a time slot that fits every colleagues' schedule by viewing their real-time congress availability together in a timeline.
- Location Availability - Instantly view the real-time availability of each of your reserved meeting rooms and effortlessly reserve your time slot.
- Conflict Analysis - The system will analyze your team members' and customers' schedule to avoid conflicts and suggested the ideal meeting times for everyone involved.
CUSTOMER EMPOWERMENT:
Give your customers the power to choose the appointment date and times that work best for their schedule.
- Ask the Customer - The Ask The Customer intelligent scheduling algorithm within Cadence can automatically find time slots that all of your invited teammates have available to then allow your customer to pick the meeting time that best suits their event schedule.
- Reschedule Appointment - If you customer needs to reschedule for any reason, they will be able to use Reschedule Appointment directly from their calendar invite.
FULL VISIBILITY IN ALL ACTIVITIES
Align your entire organization with full visibility into all appointments occurring at the event.
- My Appointments & All Appointments - Every team has full visibility of every meeting across the entire organization.
- Refine Filtering - View appointments by topic, objectives, team, customer region, country, and other criteria.
- Automated Reporting & Analytics - Automated reporting and analytics based on customer, customer type, organizer, team, customer specialty, meeting topic, objective, or other advanced filtering parameters.
How to set up Appointments
To create and manage your appointments, visit your event in the admin site and select the menu item Appointments. You will see two sub-menu items automatically enabled - My Appointments and All Appointments.
Once Appointments are enabled, it will appear for you under the "my event" menu within the admin. However, to add appointments you will navigate to the web. Under "my event," Click Appointments, and then the green plus button ( + ) to start adding your appointments.
Creating Appointments
By default, when you Create an Appointment, you will be listed as the scheduler and the organizer. You may change either the scheduler or organizer by clicking the X to the right of their name. When searching for schedulers or organizers, the system will look up all employees at your company.
The scheduler is the one that will be actively managing the appointment. They are copied on each response from the individual appointment participants. The scheduler is also the one that is listed in email communications as the person to contact in the need of changing the appointment or rescheduling.
The organizer is the one that all invites will come from when invites are sent. The organizer is traditionally the one that has the relationship with the customer. The organizer is sent summary emails of participant status rather than each individual one.
APPOINTMENT NAME
The Appointment Name is often the subject that you would include in a traditional appointment or meeting invite from your calendar. We recommend including the customers name first for visibility in their incoming email along with the topic of conversation and team they're meeting with at your company along with the event name at the end.
TOPICS & OBJECTIVES
You may enable Topics and/or Objectives for your appointments at your event. We strongly recommend that you do so. Customers, as well as your internal colleagues will come better prepared for the conversation if the topics and objectives for the conversation are clear.
DATE & TIME vs. ASK A CUSTOMER
When sending out invites, you will have two options. The first is the traditional method of speaking with your customer to find the best Date and Time, then sending out the official invite.
The other method which is greatly appreciated by your customer, is the ability to toggle on Ask Customer. Ask A Customer is an invite asking them to select the date and time that they would prefer based upon their schedule availability at the congress or if the congress is virtual, you can set a range of time for when the appointments will take place. The dates and times presented to the customer are based upon the internal colleagues of yours that you have marked as Required Attendance along with the meeting rooms you have selected. If no meeting rooms are selected, the dates & times presented to the customer will only be based on the Required Attendees employees availability.
ONLINE MEETING DETAILS
You may often want to include online meeting details for any internal colleague or customer that is unable to join live. Simply toggle on Enable Online Meeting Details and the Online Meeting Link and Online Meeting Details fields will display for you to add the details accordingly.
TURNING OFF INVITES & REMINDERS
If you are only intending on adding the appointment to your event for visibility and reporting purposes, but do not want to send any attendee an invite or a reminder, simply click the gear button and toggle off Invite and Updates & Reminders.
APPOINTMENT REGISTRATION
If you are looking to create an Appointment that allows you to send an appointment registration website to colleagues and many customers, toggle on Registration. Upon confirming your appointment you will receive an Appointment Registration URL to send out for people to register.
PREVIEWING & EDITING YOUR EMAIL
The final step before officially sending out your email is the Preview Email screen. Here you may view how the email looks for your colleagues and customers. You may edit the Email Subject Header and Email Body Copy by clicking the blue edit button beside them.
IMPORTING APPOINTMENTS
The platform supports a robust appointment importing engine from excel. The platform upon import, will analyze the excel to identify any errors, such as unrecognized cells in the spreadsheet and if the import matched organizers and customers emails. If the customer does not match, you will have the ability to create a new customer or match customers directly from the import wizard.
Additional Features!
Tailor the Appointments system to your organization’s needs and workflow.
Duration Increments
- Choose between 15, 30, 45, and 60-minute increments with time buffers.
Time Formats
- Appointments are displayed in local time with 12/24 hour display options.
Personal Messaging
- Edit each individual appointment to the organizer's personal message specifications.
Automated Reports
- Determine automated delivery of appointment status reports based upon criteria and frequency.
Bulk Actions
- Update multiple appointments at once saving valuable time.