With Calendly’s new feature, screen clients before they schedule appointments with you

If you’re looking for an easy and productive way to screen clients and customers for calendar booking, Calendly has created a new feature that greatly simplifies the process.

Calendly is an online appointment scheduling service for individuals, teams and enterprises that recently rolled out a new productivity feature called Routing Forms. This Calendly feature makes the process of booking clients more efficient and customer centric.

How Calendly’s Routing Forms work

Calendly’s Routing Forms feature lets you create a form for clients/customers with minimal screening questions (the fewer the better) – how the client/customer answers those questions will determine if and with whom they will be booked. This allows you to qualify clients before they book an appointment and makes it less likely your business will miss opportunities.

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How to create a Calendly Routing Form

First, create a Calendly account. Then, log into your account and click the Routing Forms tab from the main window (Figure A).

Figure A

In the resulting window, click New Routing Form (Figure B).

Figure B

Give the new form a name and then, when prompted, click Add A Question (Figure C).

Figure C

When you click Add A Question, you’ll be presented with a drop-down, where you can select from:

• Name
• Email address
• Phone number
• Dropdown
• Radio button
• Short answer
• Paragraph

Say, for instance, you want to create a form that allows a client or customer to add their name, email address and a reason for booking the appointment. To do that, you would first select Name from the drop-down. Configure the question – each will have different options –  and click Save (Figure D).

Figure D

Add more questions to complete your form, as you like, and click Next (Figure E).

Figure E

In the next window, you can define the routing logic that will determine where the booking request will be sent (Figure F).

Figure F

How you create the routing logic will depend on the questions you added. For example, you can route to an event such as a 30-minute meeting based on a specific domain.

You might have clients from a specific company who all use the same domain. You can configure the routing logic such that only booking requests that include their domain are routed to the 30-minute meeting (Figure G).

Figure G

In our example, all cases that do not include the example.com domain will be routed to a custom message that you can edit.

Once you’re done, click Save Route and then Public Form. You will be presented with a sharable and/or embed link that you can either send to clients and customers or add to your website.

And that’s all there is to adding a Routing Form to Calendly so you can screen people before they can book appointments to your calendar.

Give Calendly a try

If you’re looking for a great way to weed out those who shouldn’t be clogging up your already busy calendar, Calendly has created a handy solution. Give Routing Forms a go, and see if it makes your calendar booking life more efficient.

Calendly offers a free account for basic use and paid accounts to add features including automation, customization, integration and collaboration.

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