Microsoft Bookings – Easier Than Ever

Bookings from Microsoft is an Office 365 application that allows your customers to book appointments with your staff based on the services you offer and staff availability. And now with an even easier user experience.

From your Microsoft 365 page, select Bookings from your App Launcher – Tip: if you will be using Bookings frequently, be sure to Pin the app to your Navigation Pane to the left of your screen. The new Bookings page where you will create both your Personal bookings page and Shared bookings pages.

Here is a quick distinction between personal and shared bookings page:

Personal booking page

This is your page. You can create multiple services to make available to whomever you share your bookings page with. In the example above there is one 15-minute meeting, another for a 30-minute meeting. In Bookings, you can create one page and have multiple services.

If you share your bookings page, all the meeting types can be selected by those who see your page – how and where they are seen later in this blog post. You can also choose just to share an individual specific meeting.

Shared booking pages

This page is for your team or organization. It is called shared because the page is shared amongst multiple people you work with that you can include to be scheduled. In this instance, you can have multiple pages to share. You can allow for a single or multiple people on your team to be selected or scheduled for a meeting type that you offer.

Configure a Meeting on Your Personal Booking Page

Select an existing meeting or create a new meeting type button. You will be brought to a screen for you to configure your meeting.

The screen on the left is the meeting screen that allows you to create how you want the meeting on the right to be used by the people you want to share your bookings page.

Edit meeting type

• Add a title that is simple and explicit
• Description that will make sense to your client
• Location of the meeting or select to make it a Teams meeting
• Amount of time for each meeting
• Public Meetings are meetings that anyone can book given access to your bookings page – a link via your website or your email signature is an example.
• Private meetings are meeting that only people that have specific access to book – people you sent an email to with the link to the private meeting is an example.

Schedule customizations

• Use customization hours: If you do not use this feature, your Bookings will use your Outlook (Exchange) calendar. You can select this feature and setup when you specifically want users to be able to book your hours for this meeting.
• Only during dater range: you can make this a finite range of dates. You are making an exclusive offer during a special time like recruitment event, study group, or special event.
• Days of the week: If you selected the customized hours feature, here is where you define the custom hours to offer this meeting.

How to manage Bookings within Microsoft Teams

Advanced Options

Additional options are available if you select Advanced Options: 

• Buffer time before and after meetings: If you have times available that are back, this creates a buffer for you. E.g., If one person books an appointment with you from 100pm – 1:30pm and you have a 15-minute buffer after the meeting, then in this example the 1:30pm – 2:00pm meeting will no longer be available to be selected for that day.
• Minimum lead time means how long ahead of time can a client book a meeting with you. If you need a day’s notice, you should set the lead time for 1 day.
• Maximum lead time means how far in advance someone can schedule your meeting.

When you are finished with creating your meeting, scroll back to the top and select the Save button.

Share your Meeting or Personal Page

You can share just one meeting or, if you have more than one meeting type to offer, you can share you entire Personal booking page:

Shared Booking Page

As mentioned earlier, the Shared Booking Page:

• Allows multiple meeting types per page – like personal booking page
• You can add multiple staff members to each meeting – hence the term shared booking page
• Add a company logo colors and other details

Create your Bookings page

When you create your Bookings page, you can publish the page to your Facebook Page, Twitter account, or you can Email the link to your customers. You can also embed the link in your website so customers can manage their appointments or book additional appointments themselves, leaving you time to do your work instead of managing and scheduling appointments. Your clients will also receive Bookings reminders to help minimize no show appointments.

If your business typically hosts meetings with customers for financial assistance, Bookings will enable your customers to schedule – or Book – such an appointment. You can create multiple services so you can fine tune your bookings based on staff abilities and availability.

Using Bookings for Internal Staff Appointments

Some of your team members may need to connect with other coworkers to help a client. You could create an additional service and build it so only internal people have access to the service. Let us say you are someone working in the field of sales, and you are speaking with a client. You need to escalate the questions to a SME (subject matter expert) for additional details. You can look at the bookings page as if they were a client (i.e., in the above scenario) to see when you are available. You can see the SME’s availability and ask the client, “Is 3:00PM on Tuesday, okay?” With a yes from the client, you can click a button on your Bookings page and book the SME for the service they need, quickly and without trying to find availability in a calendar. Think of this option as publishing the availability of the SME to your sales team.

Summary

Using Bookings from Microsoft will make it easier for your customers to book appointments without phone calls, message tag, and lots of emails. It will help you by letting the Bookings take care of themselves while you concentrate on the services you supply your customers and colleagues.

KnowledgeWave provides training on Microsoft 365 apps, like Bookings. If you'd like to learn more schedule a call with my colleague, Dan St. Hilaire via his Bookings Page.