How to use Microsoft Bookings

hi everyone my name is Kevin today I want to show you how you can both get and use Microsoft and bookings and as full disclosure before we jump into this I work at Microsoft as a full time employee first off what is Microsoft bookings well Microsoft bookings allows customers to schedule time or appointments with small businesses so imagine that maybe you're a dentist you're a piano teacher you're a hairdresser maybe you're a gym trainer in all of those cases you have customers who want to schedule time with you so bookings sets up a page where a customer can come in they could choose a service that they want they can choose the time when they want the service and then bookings will go ahead and schedule that appointment on behalf of the customer and not only will it book the appointment but then it'll also remind to the customer as the appointment gets closer via email and via text and it's not just limited to small businesses either you could even imagine a teacher taking advantage of this maybe you have office hours and you want your students to come in and book a time during your office hours or maybe you're an office worker and rather than you sending out a meeting invitation to others you want your co-workers to come in and schedule time with you so there are lots of different people who bookings can really help with scheduling all right well why don't we jump on the PC and first off I'll show you how you can get Microsoft bookings Here I am on my PC and first off I want to show you how you can get Microsoft bookings and to do that I'm going to navigate to the website office comm and I am going to click on get office once we click on get office it's gonna show a variety of plans for home users now one thing to call out Microsoft bookings is not available to home users so if you have a family personal or home and student account you won't be able to take advantage of Microsoft bookings you need to be on a business account so I'm gonna go ahead and click on for business up here and this will show me a variety of different business accounts Microsoft bookings comes with Microsoft 365 business standard and it also comes with business premium so if you have one of these accounts you can take advantage of Microsoft bookings if you don't have it yet you could buy it the cheap plan that comes with it is 1250 per month now 1250 per month you get Microsoft bookings but not only that you also get all of the different office apps including outlook Word Excel PowerPoint publisher and access and then you also get exchanged for email you get onedrive for cloud storage you get SharePoint and you also get Microsoft teams now compared to many other offerings that also offer appointment booking it's actually a relatively reasonable deal because you are getting quite a bit of value many other offerings cost more than this and all you're getting is appointment scheduling so all in all it's a pretty good deal now you need either one of these and once you either sign up for an account or if you're ready to have an account what we're gonna do next is I'm gonna open up a browser window and assuming you now have an account we want to log into Microsoft bookings so we can get our business set up and start accepting appointments now to do that here I am on the Microsoft bookings website but what I want to do is I want to login and the easiest way to login is to go up to the URL field and type in book dot ms/ms stands for Microsoft so if you type in book dot MS this will drop you into Microsoft bookings and here we are on the home page one of the things that you'll notice here at the top of the home page we'll first off it's saying good evening Kevin Stratford it's very nice of bookings to say that to me and here calls out new features and product tips so I see all these different product tips and if I click on the carousel I'll see a lot more tips and what this is trying to do is it's trying to help me get started with bookings and make sure that my account is up and running if I look over on the left hand side probably one of the things I want to do is it says add logo and I don't yet have a logo for my business and I don't even really know what type of business I have so maybe for the purposes of this tutorial I'm gonna pretend to be a tech support company and people will be able to book time with me for tech support and maybe I'll have a few employees as well so first off let me go ahead and add a logo it's asking me to upload a new logo sure I can do that and I have this profile picture on my desktop that I'm going to use as my logo who is that handsome man and that is your very own Kevin Stratford here and I'm gonna make them logo there's nothing more narcissistic than having your own face as your logo and I'm going to go ahead and save that now so I've got my logo set up one thing I also see on here is I have the analytics a very high level analytics of how many bookings I've made estimated revenue from all of those but bookings and then also how many customers have ebooks now you see a lot of zeros here in general that's pretty bad for a business to have all these zeros unless you're a business that loses money in which case getting to zero is an accomplishment but in this case that is not good so why don't we go ahead and let's get things set up and to get things set up the first thing I want to do is over here on the left hand side I'm gonna start from the bottom and work my way up we're gonna just start with business information first so I'm gonna click on business information and so right now my business name is just Kevin Stratford I think I could do better than that so maybe I'm gonna just say Kevin Stratford and maybe we'll go with quality tech support I think that sounds like a pretty good name and then business address you could enter in an address here you could enter in your business phone number or you can enter in an email address where customer replies go to your website URL privacy policy URL any terms and service or terms and conditions you might have business type well I'm an information technology company and then the currency that you deal with and once again I've already loaded my logo unfortunately it takes a little bit of time for that to propagate through so it doesn't immediately show that could definitely be improved they're now up here with the business hours I have the hours set to 8:00 to 5:00 and that seems like a pretty good working day so I'm gonna leave the hours as they are and I've entered all my business information and so what I want to do next is over on the left hand side I said that we're gonna work our way up next I want to click on services and so I'm gonna save my changes that I made here I also could have clicked on the Save button up here so I'm gonna go ahead let's click on save it's nice that it reminded me to save that now in services I have one service added here what you could do is once you add a service simply click into that and it'll let you edit the service now I haven't really configured this yet so I'm gonna run through this and we'll walk through what type of features and different options you could set for your services and so my service is tech consulting and what I want to do is to help customers out I want to enter a little bit of a description so they understand what tech consulting encompasses and so I'm gonna say get help with your computer issues worse comes to worst we'll simply reboot and reinstall to see if that fixes the problem you know it's funny with computers sometimes rebooting is one of the best things you can do gets rid of all those phantom processes that are still running and just gets you into a clean state alright then default location you could set a location for this service in this case I'm gonna leave it as is because it is tech consulting you have the option to add an online meeting and what it'll do is it'll add a team's link within the meeting and so you can then interface with the customer online that sounds pretty cool so I'm gonna do that now I could set up the default duration for this service you have all different options you could set a certain number of days hours and minutes now I don't think I want to offer tech consulting that goes over a day so I'm gonna leave it at zero there but maybe I'm gonna set it to at least an hour so that's the minimum for my consulting services another interesting thing that was recently added is you can add buffer time on your calendar that customers can't book so let's say for example I do a one-hour session and maybe afterwards I need some time to cool down because you know tech consulting can be pretty tiring and so maybe I'll set a five or ten minute break afterwards but in this case you know I want to try to make as much money as possible with my business so if I have back-to-back tech consulting sessions I'm gonna go with it but you can set that here I'm gonna turn off the buffer time one of the things you can also set here is enable customers to manage their appointment when it was booked by you or your staff on their behalf that sounds good so if I schedule a meeting for someone the customer can then come in and they can go ahead and adjust the time or reschedule that seems like a good business practice just to give customers flexibility there and I could also set my default price here and you have lots of different options here all the way from a fixed price to starting at to hourly to call us so you could set lots of different prices now I'm gonna set a fixed price for my hour session and I'm gonna get up to lawyer level pricing and I'm gonna go with $600 here our I know that's very expensive but let's see if anyone bites and I could also add notes or internal notes here what this will do is with internal notes this is something that my staff members can see for this service in this case I don't have anything to add so I'll leave this blank now here you have something called custom fields and I'm gonna click on this what's interesting is when a customer books this service this is the information that bookings asks the customer to provide in this case I'm requiring a customer email and maybe I could also go in and say hey you have to provide a phone number and address a note and what I could do is if I go up here to the top bar I could add additional questions whether it's a text question a drop-down question so if I want different fields that the customer has to provide beyond what's listed here I could go ahead and do that but in this case I'm happy if the customer just provides an email address now one of the things that you can do here is you can send the email reminders so once a customer books a session with you you could set up different reminders so here I'm going to go ahead and click on edit and it says that one day before send a reminder to the customer and then here's the text that'll send so it says just a quick reminder that your service is coming up soon I could indicate what how far ahead of the appointment I want the reminder to go out at I could say whether it goes to the customer or the staff member or simply all attendees and then I can modify the message and so one thing you could even do I'm gonna go ahead and let's discard that but what I can do is I can even add multiple reminders so maybe a week before and then a day before I could send out different reminders and then here too I also have the option to include additional information that goes out and I have all sorts of formatting controls as part of that so very nice way where reminders will go out to your customers or to your students or to your co-workers whoever is booking in the appointment it'll remind them that they have an appointment coming up and the goal of this is that hopefully it reduces no-shows and the customers who sign up end up showing up you know the worst thing for a business is that you had an hour scheduled the customer doesn't show up and that's now time lost and you've lost that revenue for that our one of the things that bookings also does here which is very nice is not only does it send out email reminders there's also the option to send text message notifications to your customer so if you require a phone number it'll send out a text message as a reminder and one thing that bookings calls out is that this is a preview feature and at some point they may charge for it but it's currently still free or at least included with your bookings plan the next option here is publishing options and we can show this service on the booking page there's an overall booking page that lists all of your services and I would like to include this service as part of that but maybe you have a service that you no longer want to show or maybe you only send it to select customers and you don't want everyone to have access to it you can uncheck this in that case but I want all of my services to be shown on the main booking page so I'm gonna leave that checked and down here you have different scheduling policies that you can set now I'm just gonna use the default scheduling policy and I'll get to that when we get to the booking page but one thing to call out is that as you're setting up services what you can do is you can modify the booking policies for each one of the services if you want to customize it by service so let's say in the example that you're a dentist maybe if someone is just coming for a cleaning you know you need lead time of just a day but maybe if someone's coming in and you're gonna fix cavities then maybe you need more lead time because maybe there's some prep involved so different services might require different lead time and different minimum lead time and time increments so you can go ahead and modify this on the service level and similarly what you can do is you can also modify email notifications on a service level and then you can also modify whether customers can choose a specific person for booking but all of these are grayed out right now because I'm gonna just use my default scheduling policy and I'll show you how we could set that once we get there all of this looks good and once I'm done I'm going to click on save up here on top and so I now have my tech consulting service all ready to go it's a little pricey but I don't know let's try it out and see what happens the next thing is I mentioned before that we're moving our way up I want to click on laughs next and currently I'm the only staff member in this organization that means that I have to field all the requests for tech support I don't like that I need some people to help me out so I'm gonna click on add a staff member and we are going to hire Adele Vance she sent me her resume and she looks like a very promising candidate so I'll bring her on board and add her as a staff member right away now what we could do is here for Adele Vance I could set her initials I could go ahead and set a theme color for her Adele seems kind of like a green bright person so let me go ahead and set green right and what I'm gonna do here is I could set an email address a phone number for Adele so let me go ahead and set an email address for Adele I'm just gonna go ahead and type in Adele Vance at Microsoft com Adele is set as a guest there are different permissions that you could set you could have the administrator which allows you to modify all of the settings throughout Microsoft bookings you also have a viewer and a viewer is able to come in and they can modify the cat they can view the calendar with a guest that's the most limited permissions but all they can do is they could be assigned to a booking but they can't actually view the booking mailbox so it's the most limited permissions and I'm gonna set that to Adele because I mentioned she just came on board I don't know her too well so I don't know if I trust her that much yet and here it says notify the staff via email when a booking is assigned to them so if a customer comes in and picks them as the staff member they would like Adele will get an email letting her know that looks great and then for the business hours what I want to do is I want to use the standard business hours here so I'm gonna go ahead and set that one more option up above is events on office calendar affect availability what that means is if you're using Outlook as your personal calendar that will affect your availability within Microsoft bookings so like I said if you're using Outlook and maybe you have a full day of meetings on Monday well within bookings no-one will be able to book time with you on Monday because that time is taken so it's kind of it's very nice how Microsoft bookings integrates with your Outlook calendar and it has awareness of what else is going on so very very nice functionality so we've got Adele as a staff member here let's go ahead and save her as a new staff member so now not only am i fielding tech support but we also have Adele on board and hopefully she picks up a lot of the heavy load because here I am running this company I'd like my staff to do most of the work okay the next thing that we're gonna do is I'm gonna jump over customers for now and we'll come back to this but first I want to go to the booking page and now with the booking page this is where customers will go to book these service with you so let's run through this and see what some of the different options are the first one is require a Microsoft 365 or office 365 account from my organization to book what this means is you know maybe you're an office worker and you have office hours and you only want people in your organization to book time with you you can check this box but if you're say a dentist or you're a gym trainer or piano teacher and you have external customers booking time with you you do not want to check this because they might have any email address they might have a Gmail Yahoo and AOL so any type of email address you don't want to check this now with this next one disable direct search engine indexing if you have a business like a hair salon or something like that you want search engines to index you because people can find your service and then people could book time with you but once again maybe you're a teacher maybe you're an office worker and you don't want search engines to pick it up in which case you can go ahead and disable that but in this case I want people to find my page so I'm not going to disable it now they have a customer data usage consent as a customer fills out your booking form they're providing their name their email address their phone number so it's personal data and you can include different information here about your collection policies if you'd like now here's where we can set the default scheduling policies I mentioned earlier on the services that you can modify it on a service level but here I just want to set my scheduling policy all up and all my services will use this and so time increments so this is the time increments that a customer could book in so they could book in 30 minute increments that means that someone could book at 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30 so I think that sounds good I'll set it on 30-minute increments and then the minimum lead time for bookings at sets at 24 hours that means I get a days and of an appointment coming up that sounds pretty good I'd like to have at least a heads up so if no one books maybe I take the day off and it'd be nice to know ahead of time versus a meeting coming in at the last minute and the maximum lead time I'm gonna set it so the maximum time someone can set out is a year I don't think it makes sense for someone to set out and a tech support thing for two years out otherwise they could probably solve the problem on their own within email notifications notify the business via email when a booking is created so if a customer comes in and sets up an appointment it'll send me a notification that's very nice to have so I'm gonna leave that checked and send a meeting invite to the customer this one is interesting not only will it tell the customer that they have an appointment it's confirmed but you could also send a meeting invite so an Outlook you could get a meeting invitation in Gmail you can get a meeting invitation and it'll add it to the calendar I personally really like this so I'm gonna check that box I like when businesses send me an appointment cuz then on my phone I could just add it to my calendar it's nice functionality so I'm gonna check that but you're calling whether you want to use something like that and then you also have down here the staff allow customers to choose a specific person for the booking I added Adele as a staff member and maybe my customers really like Adele and they want to pick her why not I'll let people do that so I'm gonna check that box as well down here at the very bottom now there's an option for general availability and right now it's set to bookable and staff are free so as long as either Adele or I have some availability customers will be able to book now you also have not booked able in custom hours and it's more interesting down here if I click on the set different availability for a date range so here I might want to say hey not bookable for you know maybe July 4th because we're gonna take that week off so you could go ahead and set time that people can't book and then you could even set custom hours as well for when people could book during a certain time period let's say if maybe it's leading up to Christmas and you have shortened hours you could go ahead and set those those shortened hours I don't need to do that so I'm gonna go ahead and just simply delete that but you do have a lot of flexibility here in terms of what the availability is I'm gonna scroll up and work my way down the right-hand side so this is my page right now let me go with a lighter blue just to make it a little more cheery you know people always look forward to text poor it so whatever I could do to lift their spirits along with these default color themes I could also set a custom color scheme for my booking page and what you could do is you could set two colors a highlight color and a header color by defining the number value for the color but I like the pre-selected ones so I'm simply gonna go with that I could also display my business logo on my booking page if you remember I set my profile picture as my business logo and of course I want to show that on my booking page so I will leave this checked down here with the time zone what you could do is you could set the time zone settings and you could show it in the business time zone or the local users time zone to be user friendly maybe I have people calling in from other time zones I want the times to match their time zone but when I get the appointment it will aligned with my time zone and then lastly what you can also do is you can use Twilio Twilio is an SMS notification service but if you use Twilio you can set this up and it'll send SMS or text messages to remind customers of appointments okay well I filled out all of these details on the booking page so the next thing that I need to do is if I go to the top of the page to publish my page I need to click on save and publish let's click on that and yes my page is now live if I click on open publish page I can see what this looks like so let's take a look look at that here's the handsome guy that you're scheduling tech support with and what I could see here is a Kevin strive for a quality tech support tech consulting one hour that's the service that I offer and that's the service that's selected because that's the only service I added it's a little pricey but to get to talk to Kevin might be a good deal and here I could see the days of the week that I could choose so I could choose different days of the week and then I see the hours that are available and in fact what I could do here is I could select different staff so if I just select Kevin I'll see that on Monday Kevin's a little busier he's only available at 8:00 and 8:30 so not as much time but if I click on Adelle she has a lot more availability so maybe I'll schedule some time well let's go with Kevin I mean if I'm gonna pay $600 I might as well get him and I could go with 8:00 a.m. here so this once again this is the experience that your customer will see as they're going through and scheduling or booking an appointment with you they could also see the times if they want to if a customer wants to modify the time zone they could click there choose a different time zone and then this is where the customer adds their details so let's say that Emily Emily Braun wanted an appointment with me and her email address is kept strapped to at outlook.com so she's gonna enter in her email address and she can enter a phone number an address and any notes now Emily entered a note here saying this better be good considering how much money I'm paying you not fair enough it's a lot of money hopefully I could solve our tech problems and now emily is gonna go ahead and she's gonna book this meeting or book this appointment with my business Emily sees a confirmation message saying thank you for booking with us you will get an confirmation message and email shortly and then she could click on okay now the next thing that Emily sees is it's a confirmation page with her appointment who it's with and she also sees the price again and so what Emily could do is she could reschedule if actually she wants a different time she could cancel the booking if maybe she realizes that she's paying a lot of money for something she could probably just use Bing or Google to solve or she could set up another appointment if she really wants to talk to me and she finds my sessions really compelling now that emily is booked time let's jump into Emily's email and what I can see now is here it's sent through a meeting invitation or a calendar invite remember when I went through the settings I said send the calendar invite will Emily receive the calendar invite and if she clicks yes now what this does is I'm going to click over onto my calendar and we're gonna go over to Monday coming up next week and what we could see now is the tech consulting shows up on her calendar so I really like doing that it's a nice thing but your customer will get an additional message by email and here if I click on the latest one I'll see the confirmation email so it says confirmed booking for Emily it has the details once again and I included a team's link in there so I could join the team's meeting and I could also click here to manage my booking and if Emily clicks on manage booking that'll take her back to this page where she could reschedule cancel or book an meeting so pretty nice and streamlined experience for Emmeline I'm gonna go back to the main bookings experience so this is for my business now and on the booking page some of the other things that I could do is I could also embed my booking link on a website so here I could just simply copy the HTML code or I could even copy the iframe code and then I could insert this and to say a web page or maybe in a Facebook message or a Facebook link for my business page or maybe I put it on Twitter so wherever I want to share that booking link I could do that or maybe even in my email let's say my email signature I can include the link there just tell people hey by the way if you want to book time with me feel free to do that earlier we skipped over the customers option here so let's go back to customers and the reason I did that is well I wanted to add a customer first so here you see anyone who fills out my booking page automatically gets added to my customer list and if I click on Emily I can then go ahead and let's click on edit I can edit the customer details if I'd like I can add all sorts of information like the name the email the phone I am all types of information now I'm not going to make any changes I'll just cancel what I can also do I could add new customers here if I click on new customers I could add someone or I could even import customers let's say you run an established business and you simply want to pull in existing customers you could upload a CSV file to make it very quick and easy to get customers into Microsoft bookings but once again I had a booking page that someone could just sign up on so I had Emily go ahead and enter her information so I didn't have to do that the next thing I'm gonna click on is calendar over on the left-hand side and I haven't currently set to the month view and here I see that there is an appointment now coming up on Monday for tech consulting so I'm gonna click on Monday and I can even jump to a day view and here I'll see with the day view I have both Adele and I also have me I currently have a tech consulting session set up with Emily Adele currently has nothing going on and then I see all the other times on my Outlook calendar and that are busy they show up here so I have a pretty busy Monday coming up I could also switch to the work week view and see all the upcoming appointments so lots of different views that I can set and I could also go to the month view now on the calendar view some of the other things you can do is let's imagine that you know maybe you're a hair salon or your gym trainer and you're meeting with your customer and they simply ask you hey can you set up an appointment for me right now on the calendar view what you can do is click on new booking go down to the service the only service I have is tech consulting but if you had more services you could select from all your different services and I'm going to click on tech consulting and then here I could simply set up an appointment so I could type in the name the customer email I have some of the settings of send an email confirmation but since the customer's doing it in person maybe I don't have to do that I can set to let the customer manage your booking and here I have all the details I could set the times I could also add a buffer time so all the same types of things that I could do earlier I could do that here as well so this way I'm gonna discard this but I could go ahead and simply book something on behalf of a customer now another interesting thing here too is I can set my time off so if I click on time off I might want to say hey I'm not available at all between these dates and then that way if a customer tries to book time it'll show that I'm unavailable or maybe Adel my employee wants to take some time off I could set that on here and she won't be an available staff member all right well that wraps up this overview of Microsoft bookings if you're a small business owner or a teacher or an office worker and you think you can now have your customers your co-workers or your students go ahead and book time with you please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see future videos like this hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out and lastly if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future leave a comment down below I read them all and I'll add it to my list of videos to create all right well that's all I have for you today I hope you enjoyed and I also hope to see you next time bye

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 192,554

Keywords: kevin stratvert, Microsoft bookings, bookings, microsoft, booking, microsoft booking, microsoft book, book, schedule, appointment, small business, customer, customers, business, acuity scheduling, appointlet, gigabook, scheduleonce, setmore, simplybook, square appointments, supersaas, vcita, customer booking website, email reminder, text reminder, reminders, website

Id: 647C4gZt9Fo

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020