How To Suggest Meeting Time Slots via the Chrome Extension

 

Tip

Also see this Revenue Grid blog article for special insights

 

Suggesting specific meeting time (Time Slots)

RG Email Sidebar enables you to schedule meetings with your business contacts without any extra back-and-forth email correspondence. Select available time slots in your calendar, also considering availability of your colleagues involved, create and send out interactive meeting invites, get your calendar automatically updated according to the recipient’s time choice. Additionally, RG Email Sidebar adds Events created this way to your Salesforce account.

On link generation, selected Time Slots are parsed as a “static shot” that does not exclude suggested slots which got reserved after the link was generated.
However, any reservations added to the Organizer’s calendar later are also considered by the Time Slots system. As soon as a recipient clicks on their preferred slot, RG Email Sidebar checks if the slot is still available in the organizer’s calendar. In case it is occupied by another reservation, the recipient is suggested to pick another slot. In addition, by refreshing booking page browser window, the recipient can actualize the table after such checks.

 

To schedule a meeting via RGES Meeting Scheduler by sharing your preferred time slots through an interactive invitation:

1. Open an email from/to recipient(s) who you want to initiate a meeting with or create a new email message by clicking the New email or the Reply button in Gmail and specify one or multiple recipients in the To, Cc, or BCC fields.

 

2. In RG Email Sidebar, click the Time slots icon in bottom toolbar Smart actions.

 

 

3. On the first page of RG Email Sidebar’s Meeting Scheduler, fill in the basic details:

• Meeting subject. This field is prefilled with the subject of related email message; you can modify it according to your preferences

• Location and duration

• In the Location picklist you can select a location retrieved from your rooms resources or manually enter a location or conference room link; in addition, RG Email Sidebar stores five latest locations you used for your meetings and displays them for quick access as recent rooms in the picklist

• Select Duration from the picklist. The minimum duration is 15 min, the maximum is 2 hours, the increase step is 15 min.
  You can also change the meeting time zone in the Slots in picklist at the bottom of the dialog (by default it’s set in your client’s time zone)

• Save to Salesforce record. In this field you can select the primary Business record (e.g. an Account or Opportunity) to be associated with the event in Salesforce. Please note that if you leave this field blank, the event will not be auto-saved in Salesforce

• Save to Lead or Contact. In this field you can select additional Person records (e.g. Leads or Contacts) to be associated with the event in Salesforce

• Body (Description) Additional event information to be used as meeting description in Google calendar and in Salesforce. Please note that it will not be auto-included into the text of the invitation email generated by Meeting Scheduler

 

 

Then fill in the optional meeting parameters put under Advanced options tab:

• Reminder. Here you can define if you want a reminder to be auto-set up in your Google calendar to notify you before the meeting starts; it can trigger from 0 and several minutes to hours or days. up to two weeks prior to the meeting

• Attendees (required); Attendees (optional). Required attendees are the key meeting participants, optional attendees are additional meeting participants. These fields are prefilled with email addresses/Contact names from respectively the To/CC fields and the BCC field of the email opened in Gmail. You can add more attendees by entering their email addresses/Contact names in this field or remove attendees from the invitation by clicking the ( x ) icon next to their email addresses/Contact names. Note that in the Attendees list external ones (not belonging to your org) are listed on top, the internal (in-org) ones listed below them

After all fields are filled in, click Next.

Tip

You can hide the advanced Time slots dialog’s fields and controls which you do not use when creating meetings, just click the v (collapse) icon next to the Advanced options section title

 

4. Next, RG Email Sidebar will read your Google calendar data and build daily tables of your unoccupied time slots. Choose the meeting date using the calendar control at the top of the Meeting Scheduler screen and then pick one or multiple available meeting time spans by clicking on a free slot and dragging the cursor down; selected time spans can be bigger than the meeting Duration specified at the previous step but cannot be shorter.

Tip

Note that you can select multiple time slots on different dates: after you have picked slots on one date and then switch to another date using the calendar control at the top, all previously selected slots are kept. Click Next after selecting the needed meeting slots to proceed

 

For your convenience, if any of the meeting’s attendees are your colleagues (their email addresses recognized as internal), their parsed calendars are also shown at this step, so you will be able to select meeting time slots also suiting their calendars:

>>> Click to see a screenshot <<<

 

Note

In the latest updates of RG Email Sidebar if you select several adjacent time slots, they do not get merged and several different slot links are generated

 

5. Click Finish to insert generated time slots links into your email message.

 

Tip

If you want to set a custom meeting time slots message template, refer to this article

 

 

Time Slots Dialog Auto-Filling

To enhance use convenience, after the Autumn 2021 RG Email Sidebar update, RGES Meeting Scheduler includes a possibility to configure automatic prefilling of any Book Me / Time Slots dialog fields according to the customer’s preference. For example, the Subject field can mirror relevant email’s subject or include a custom text or a combination of email’s subject and a custom text. This option can be enabled for big Enterprise customers; to get it configured please send a detailed request to our Support team.

 

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How to Select a Time Slot (Recipient Side)

The recipient getting the meeting invitation links will be able to select their preferred slot for the meeting from among the possible options you suggested by clicking the necessary slot in the interactive table or dragging the Book a meeting control into it. Additionally, the recipients can select their actual time zone in the upper left corner of the scheduling page in order to see what local time the time slots are set in. Booking confirmation page language is set based on the locale specified in link recipient’s web browser.
After a slot is selected, a confirmation dialog will appear. See the screenshots below.

>>> Click to see screenshots (New View) <<<

 

 

As soon as the first recipient selects a time slot, the calendars of the organizer and other attendees will be automatically updated and a corresponding email notification will be sent out to them.

If the meeting time slots links are sent to multiple recipients (potential attendees), only the slot picked by the first attendee who books the meeting is considered, the rest attendees will not be able to pick other time slots, the time slot choice will locked for them:

 

Important

The time slot links are valid for two weeks; they expire after the meeting time passes or 60 days after they are generated. A meeting may be scheduled for any date in the future, but the recipients must reserve their preferred time slots within 60 days. This validity period can be adjusted on request

 

The Extra Fields: Phone Number and Notes

Starting with the Autumn 2021 update, the Booking page also includes optional fields Phone number and Notes. These fields allow meeting attendees to let the Organizer as well as other participants know their phone numbers for direct connection or provide extra details prior to the meeting.

>>> Click to see a screenshot <<<

 

Important

Since entered Phone number and Notes get appended to the meeting’s Description, they also get conveyed to all required as well as optional meeting invitees. For this reason, the recipients should always consider if the Phone number is worth including in their specific privacy and discretion circumstances and what information can be listed in meeting Notes

 

Important

The time slot links are valid for two weeks; they expire after the meeting time passes or 14 days after they are generated. A meeting can be scheduled for any date in the future, but the recipients must reserve their preferred time slots within 14 days. This period can be adjusted on request

   

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