We have been hard at work releasing several awesome new updates to our linked Google Calendars!
We have always had the ability to read appointments from linked Google Calendars in a couple of ways. Our Google TAGS allowed you to place information within the <> brackets with customer information as well as appointment reminder type information. For example, you could create an appointment in Google Calendar and then add a TAG to either the title or the description of the appointment.
An example TAG may look like this <text Joe Smith 303-555-1212>. This TAG would add a customer named “Joe Smith” to your customers list and then send a text reminder to that customer. There are additional fields you can add to these TAGs as well such as custom fields and custom reminder types. You can find more info on TAGS HERE. If your customer has already been added (through a TAG or another method), you can simply add their first and last name in the appointment title and we would send a reminder to them.
We are now announcing a couple of great NEW features that will make your linked Google Calendar Reminders even more robust and user friendly!
- You can now select whether you want to read both or either the TAGs and/or the “Name Match”. This is helpful if for example you do not want us to do the Name Match and only read TAGs. This could be the case if you regularly add your customer’s name to the appointment title but don’t necessarily want to send them a reminder.
- We have also added the ability to Set a Default Reminder for your Google Calendar reminders. This way, if you use several Google Calendars, you can set up a different default reminder for each one. You can always override this using TAGs.
- Our biggest update is the ability to write customer replies back to your Google Calendar. Previously, we only read from your Google Calendar and we know that many of you have been asking for the ability to write back into it for some time. You can choose to have your customer’s replies written back into the description of the Google Calendar Appointment as well as change the color of the appointment based on your customer’s response. We give you the ability to select which color to change your appointment to given an expected response. For example, if you have a text reminder that says something like “Hi, you have an appointment with Sun Prairie Dental on Jan 4th at 10AM. Please reply 1 to confirm, or 2 to cancel”, you can choose to change the appointment color to BLUE if the customer replies with a 1 and RED if the customer replies with a 2. This allows you to easily scan your Google Calendar for any specific replies.
Hopefully you will find the new updates to Google Calendar Reminders helpful and beneficial. We have a lot more features and updates in the works so check back often for new content!
