Let your customer choose and book their own appointment slot

• Invite your customer or prospect to book an appointment at a time that suits you both - no more back and forth or clashes.
• Once booked, the appointment is recorded on the lead and can trigger automated actions or simply notify the FLG user by email.
• The booking assistant is accessed by sending your customer a link via an email template variable.
• The page is mobile and tablet friendly, so customers can book at a time and place convenient to them.

Prerequisites

• A lead must exist before you can invite a customer to book an appointment against it.
• You must connect your external calendar to FLG CRM via the profile menu in the bottom left corner: Update Profile > Calendar Settings > Open Calendar Settings. This is powered by Cronofy.
• An Appointment Type must exist. This keeps appointments consistent by restricting duration, user/group and location.
  • Create one via Settings > Appointments.
  • Access is controlled by the Administration permission "Enable user to manage appointment settings".

Emailing a Booking URL to Your Customer

• Add an appointment booking URL to an email as a template variable.
• When the email is sent - manually, via a lead action, or within a workflow - FLG creates a unique session for that invitation, linked to a specific lead and appointment type.
• The URL is valid until the appointment is booked, at which point it expires.

Adding the Booking URL to an Email Template

1. Go to Settings > Templates and open an existing template, or click Add New Template and select a lead group to associate it with.
2. Click Merge Tags in the body of the email
3. Expand the Appointment Links section and find descriptions starting with "Link to..." - variables are prefixed with APPT to indicate an appointment booking URL. 
4. Place your cursor in the email subject or body where you want the URL to appear.
5. Click the name of the appointment type you want to invite your customer to book. 
6. The template variable is inserted, wrapped in { } tags. 
7. When the email is sent, the variable is replaced with the actual booking URL for that lead.
8. When your customer clicks the link, they're shown a simplified Appointments booking assistant. 

Hiding the URL Behind a Link

• For a cleaner-looking email, hide the booking URL behind clickable text rather than showing the raw link.

1. Type the text you want customers to click, e.g. "Click here to make an appointment now!"
2. Add the appointment booking URL as a template variable into the email body, or into another application to copy later.
3. Select the text you want to turn into a link, e.g. "here".
4. Carefully copy the template variable added earlier - copy only from the opening { to the closing }, e.g. {APPT_INITIAL_MORTGAGE_FACT_F}, with no extra spaces or characters.
5. Click the link button in the template editor toolbar, at the start of the third group of controls on the second row.
6. On the Link Info tab, select <other> from the Protocol dropdown - leave Link Type set to URL.
7. Paste the template variable exactly into the URL box.
8. Click OK on the Link popup.
9. The selected text is now a link.

• Note: you can also send the booking link via SMS - use SMS short links to shorten it.

Showing the Booking Assistant as an iFrame

• This is an advanced option requiring input from whoever manages your website.
• Refer to the Appointment Session API documentation for full details.
• The process works by posting a request to FLG, which returns a public URL to load on your website for the customer.
• The request to FLG includes:
  • Resource URL - identifies your FLG domain
  • Authorization - gives your website permission to access your appointments
  • Lead - lets FLG create an appointment session unique to a lead (the lead must already exist)
  • Appointment Type - identifies the appointment type to show your customer
• This information is split between the request header and body, as defined in the Appointment Session API documentation.
• FLG's response includes a public URL (publicURL) which your website loads to give the customer access to the booking assistant for that lead and appointment type.
• You can generate a lead via the lead API before loading the booking assistant, making the process feel seamless to the customer.
• There is currently no way to create a new lead through the Appointments booking assistant itself.

Retrieving Your Domain (for Resource URL)

• Your domain is the address your browser uses to access FLG: https://<your domain>.flg360.co.uk.
• For example, if you access FLG at https://demo.flg360.co.uk, your domain is demo.

Generating an Access Key (for Authorization)

1. Go to Settings > Configuration > Access Keys.
2. Click Add New Access Key.
3. Add an Access Key Description to identify it.
4. Check the permission Allow access to Appointments - no other permissions are needed.
5. Click Continue.

Retrieving Your Lead ID

• The method depends on your workflow, but it's usually returned in an earlier API response, such as when a lead is created via the create lead API.
• Refer to our API documentation for more information.

Retrieving Your Appointment Type ID

1. Go to Settings > Appointments.
2. Click the required appointment type.
3. From the edit screen, click the Options icon (three dots) in the top right.
4. Select Properties.
5. Copy the Appointment Type ID.
6. Click Cancel.

Making Your iFrame Mobile Responsive

• Mobile browsers can render content in a way that causes the appointment view to scale incorrectly.
• To fix this, add the following line to the <head> section of your webpage:
• <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">