Let your customer choose and book their own appointment slot

Created by Daniel Beckett, Modified on Thu, 18 May, 2023 at 4:08 PM by Daniel Beckett

You can invite your customer or prospect to make an appointment with you at a time convenient to them and when you're available. No more going back and forth to find a convenient time for a call or meeting and no more clashes. Once your customer makes an appointment, it'll be recorded on the lead. It can also trigger automated actions or simply notify the FLG user by email. The Appointments booking assistant is accessed by sending your customer a link to it via an email template variable. The page is mobile and tablet friendly so your customers can choose their appointment at a time and place most convenient to them.

Prerequisites

Appointments is used to arrange a date and time for your users to engage with your customers on an existing lead. A lead must therefore exist before you can invite your customer to book an appointment against it.

Appointments requires the user to connect their external calendar to FLG CRM. This is done through the profile menu in the bottom left corner of FLG CRM. Click Update profile > Calendar Settings > Open Calendar Settings. This element is powered by Cronofy.

Before you can ask your customer to make an appointment with you, an Appointment type must exist. This restricts your customer and ensures the appointment is created in a consistent way based on the correct duration, user or group and location. Click Settings > Appointments to create an appointment type. Access is controlled by the Administration permission “Enable user to manage appointment settings”. An Introduction to Appointments will tell you more.

Email a URL to your customer to book an appointment

This is done by adding an appointment booking URL to an email as a template variable. When you send the email to your customer from FLG either manually, via a lead action or within a workflow, FLG creates a unique session for that appointment invitation based on the appointment type which links it back to a specific lead. The appointment booking URL is valid until the appointment is booked at which point it expires and can no longer be used.

To add an appointment booking URL to an email template:

Click Settings > Templates and open an existing email template or create a new template by clicking Add New Template and selecting the lead group to associate the template with
Click Insert template variable above the email template subject
Expand the Appointment links section and go to where the descriptions start with "Link to..." and the variables are prefixed with APPT - APPT indicates that it is an appointment booking URL
Place the cursor in the email editor subject or body at the point you want the appointment booking URL
Click the name of the appointment type in the Appointment links section you want to invite your customer to book
The appointment booking URL template variable will be inserted into your email template in { and } tags
At the time of sending the email, the template variable is replaced with the appointing booking URL relating to the lead which your customer can open
When your customer clicks the appointment booking URL in the email, they are shown a simplified Appointments booking assistant

To improve the look of your your email, it's best to hide your appointment booking URL behind a link. To do this in your email template editor:

Type the text you want your customers to click to open the Appointments booking assistant. For instance, "Click here to make an appointment now!" where "here" will open the Appointments booking URL
Add the appointment booking URL as a template variable into the body of the email or into another application to copy later
Select the text you want to make into the link e.g. "here"
Carefully copy the appointment booking URL template variable added earlier - do not copy any spaces or extra characters. Only copy from the opening { to the closing } e.g. {APPT_INITIAL_MORTGAGE_FACT_F}
Click the link button in the template editor toolbar - this is at the start of the third group of controls on the second row
On the Link Info tab of the Link popup, select <other> from the Protocol dropdown list. The Link Type should be left set as URL
Copy the appointment booking URL template variable exactly into the URL box
Click OK on the Link popup
The text selected will now be a link

Note: You can drop your customer's an SMS with the link to book and appointment. To shorten the link in your SMS, use SMS short links.

Show the Appointments booking assistant as an iFrame in your website or as part of your website flow

This is an advanced option which will require input and action by the person responsible for your website. Refer to the Appointment session API documentation for full information. This works by posting a request to FLG and FLG posting a response which includes a public URL which you load on your website for your customer to access the Appointments booking assistant.

The request to FLG includes:

Resource URL to identify your FLG domain
Authorization which gives your website permission to access your appointments
Lead to allow FLG to create an appointment session unique to a lead - this is why the lead must exist before a journey can be used to collect more information on that lead
Appointment type to identify the appointment type you wish to show your customer

This information is split between the request header and body as defined in the Appointment session API documentation.

The FLG response includes a public URL (publicURL) which your website loads for your customer to get access to a specific appointment type which will save information against a specific lead when the appointment is made.

It is possible to generate a lead using established lead API methods before loading the Appointments booking assistant and making it appear to your customer as a single process. There is currently no way to create a new lead through the Appointments booking assistant.

How to retrieve your domain (for Resource URL)

To show the Appointments booking assistant as an iFrame or as part of your website, first retrieve your domain. This is the address your browser uses to access FLG: https://<your domain>.flg360.co.uk. For instance, should you access FLG by navigating to https://demo.flg360.co.uk then your domain would be "demo".

How to generate an Access Key (for Authorization)

Click Settings > Configuration > Access Keys
Click Add New Access Key
Add an Access Key Description to identify it
Check the permission Allow access to Appointments - no other permissions are needed
Click Continue

How to retrieve your lead ID

The method to retrieve the lead ID depends on your workflow but it's likely that this will be posted in an earlier API response such as when a customer generated a lead on your website using the create lead API. Refer to our API documentation for more information.

How to retrieve your appointment type ID

Click Settings > Appointments
Click the required appointment type
From the edit screen click the Options icon (three dots) in the top right
Select Properties
Copy the Appointment type ID
Click Cancel

How to make your iFrame mobile responsive

Due to the way mobile browsers render content in a virtual viewpoint, you may find that the appointment view does not scale correctly. To rectify this issue add the following line of code within the <head> section of your webpage.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">

Need more help?

We always aim to provide great support to everyone. Contact our support team for help and advice or let us know how we can improve FLG on our feedback site.