Calendly is a free online appointment scheduling service that lets you fix appointments or meetings with invitees in an easy manner. It is helpful for you as well as for all those people who wants to fix an appointment with you. Using Calendly, you can simply add event types for week days that will let others view about when you will be free/available for meetings. It even lets you synchronize your Google calendar to automatically add new events to your Google Calender. But Google calendar’s event will not add to Calendly calendar.
You can add as many events as you want, and can send link of your calendar page to people. People can open that link without any sign up, can view date & time available for appointment, and can apply to schedule meeting with you. All the appointments are updated automatically on your Calendly calendar.
Interface for Calendly calendar is quite similar to Google calendar, like visible in above screenshot.
Key Features Present In This Online Appointment Scheduling service are:
- A handy service to schedule appointments for week days. Invitees will be able to see when you are free for meeting.
- It provides three default event types (15 minutes, 30 minutes, and 60 minutes meeting) that you can use. Apart from these event types, you can create multiple event types accordingly.
- You can choose a calendar URL for your Calendly account, which you can share with people to let them see when will you will be free.
- It lets you sync your Google calendar with it. Thus, any new event created by you will be added automatically to your Google account.
- You will be notified with an email also, when an appointment is scheduled with an invitee. You can even cancel the appointment and the invitee will receive event cancellation.
- It is a free service. A simple sign up is needed.
How To Schedule Appointments With This Free Online Appointment Scheduling Service?
You have to sign up with any of your Google account to use Calendly. Allow access to this service with your Google account. Then after, select time zone, and a URL for your Calendly account. This URL will be unique and permanent for your Calendly account which you can share with others to view events.
After finishing the basic setup, you will come to the dashboard of your Calendly account. This dashboard (or calendar) will show all the appointments when an invitee will schedule an appointment with you.
Add Events To Schedule Appointments With People:
Click on your username to access Event types page option where you will be able to add an event. As mentioned above, it provides three default events which you can use. Or simply start with your own one.
Provide the name of event, time duration, description (optional), Event URL of your choice, and select any color. If you want, you can even add additional questions. Additional questions are also for invitees and questions could be anything, like purpose of meeting, venue, etc.
After filling these details, you need to set weekly recurring availability timings. These timings will let invitees view the appointment timings available to meet you.
Set timings according to your availability and save the changes. In the similar way, you can add more and more events and can view or edit each event using Event types.
After setting the event types, you can provide your Calendly URL to people in an email or through message. And whenever a person has to fix appointment with you, he/she can open that link. In below screenshot, you can see how your Calendly scheduling page will look to people.
From the event types list, a person can select any type and can check whether you are available for a particular date & time or not. If a spot is found for a particular day, then that person can view timings to fix appointment for that day with you.
Similar services we reviewed earlier are: Doodle, and NeedToMeet.
Conclusion:
Calendly is an effective online appointment scheduling service and works really fine. It is a handy service to schedule appointments with people by selecting the event types, meeting duration, and weekly recurring availability.
