When it comes to appointment scheduling, it's important that you take full control of your schedule. When you don't have the flexibility to decide who can select times on your calendar, you might end up wasting more time cancelling and rescheduling meetings. The worse case is that it becomes annoying when unwanted bookings take up your schedule, and prevent your customers from selecting availabilities that work for them.
Quite a few of our users have shared with us the need of having the option to accept or decline events manually for their business. They want to make sure that appointments are booked by the right people. Some don't want to make their schedule available for cold sales calls, and wish to restrict calendar only for paid clients and business partners. Some want to verify a new lead's information first before they decide to approve the booked consultation.
After hearing these feedback, we had a better understanding of why an "Event Request" features is important for businesses. So we decided to prioritize building this feature to reinforce the scheduling process.
Now, we are happy to announce that CozyCal supports the "Event Request" feature, which allows you to manually accept or decline event requests and take full control of your schedule. It helps to:
- eliminate unwanted bookings from taking up your time slots
- reduce the need of having to reschedule meetings
- share your booking link freely without worrying about undesired bookings
Here's a diagram showing you the flow of how Event Requests feature works when it is enabled for an event type:
1. Enable Event Request feature for selected event types
If you have multiple event types on your booking page, you can enable the "Event Request" feature for selected event types only. Of course, if you no longer need the Event Request feature, you can disable it easily anytime.
In the example booking page below, if you only want to manually accept or decline event requests for Design Workshop, you can enable "Event Request" feature for this particular event type only without affecting others. In this example, the other event type Free Consultation will continue to accept meetings automatically on behalf of the business owner.
2. Customize Event Request email notifications
Once the "Event Request" feature is enabled, you can customize emails that are sent to the guests for notifications. There are default email templates provided, but you can tweak the content in the templates to make the emails more personal.
There are three types of email notifications that you can customize:
- Request Pending Email: guests receive this email after they select an event, time slot and send in the event request
- Request Declined Email: guests receive this email after you decline the event request
- Event Confirmation Email: guests receive this email after you accept the event request
3. Accepting or decline events manually
The whole process of manually accepting or declining event requests is simple and straightforward. When a guest sends you an event request, you will receive an event request notification email right away.
The email contains answers collected from the intake form, which makes it easy for you to assess and verify whether the scheduled guest is legitimate or not.
Simply click on Accept or Decline Guest in the email and you will be led to your CozyCal account where you can manually accept or decline the event request. Whether you accept or decline the event request, your guests will receive emails notifying them of your decision.
Take full control of your schedule
Automated scheduling shouldn't make you feel anxious when you cannot control who gets to put time on your calendar.
CozyCal's new "Event Request" feature ensures that you get to decide whether an event is accepted or declined, thereby eliminating the need to cancel unwanted meetings and reduce rescheduling meetings last minute.
After all, you deserve to have full control of your schedule so you can spend less time on wrestling with your calendar and more time on things that matter.
