Manage Your Clients with Ease Using Calendy and Airtable
By: Noor Abdulbaki, Shanty Kamal & Sonia Martins
For many entrepreneurs, their first office will be their living room; their first employee, themselves. It is crucial to manage your most valuable resource, yourself, in an efficient manner. Here we take the at-home-business Ruby’s Beauty Salon as an example to show how online tools such as Calendly, AirTable and Zapier can help you build your client base through accurate and reliable scheduling of appointments.
Such online tools are free to start, and come with the option of affordable subscription plans that grant you access to more advanced features. You can find a summary of what free plans give you, and the cost of subscriptions for Calendly, AirTable and Zapier at the end of this tutorial.
Below is a step by step process with photos pointing out key features to be aware of, followed by video tutorials to help you get started with building your very own client scheduling system:
Step 1: Create an event type in Calendly
Set up an account with Calendly.
Calendly offers a series of features that enable meetings to be scheduled easier. Calendly gives you the option to create one-on-one and group meetings, allowing multiple people to select the same time slot. Select or create an event type you want people to book and customize it.
You will be taken to the event set up page, here, fill out the details of the event such as name, location, event description, etc. Make sure to utilize the event link customization in creating an easy to remember, branded event link.
Customize the scheduled time and length of events. Calendly offers the option of selecting and customizing the time range, in which your events are available for bookings. For this tutorial, we offer 90-minute appointments.
In the Advanced option for availability, Calendly offers features that enhance the scheduling experience. Users can prevent last minute booking by assigning the minimum booking time before activities. Event buffers can also be incorporated to allow enough transition time from one booking to the next. For example, Ruby would like 15 minutes before/after her appointments to clean and set up for the next one.
Additional options such as specific questions, booking notification and reminder formats as well as payment method can be added for people booking your calendar.
New questions can be added with different answer types, you will also decide whether answering the question when making an appointment is required or optional for your clients.
The format of answers can be modified according to the question you have asked. The format could be a short one line answer, multiple lines, radio buttons, checkboxes or restricted to being a phone number. The required box can be checked when you need clients or invitees to provide an answer to that question.
To decrease the chances of forgotten appointments, you can set up automatic reminder emails or texts under the Notifications and Cancellation Policy section. You get to customize the body of the message to be sent however you wish, as well as how far in advance you’d like it to be sent out.
At this point we are ready to preview our booking system. Go ahead and click on the View Live link at the top right hand corner of your screen. You will be offered the option of previewing the outlook of your event from a client or invitee’s perspective from the drop down menu on the new tab that Calendly opens. This is what your customers will see when they visit your customized Calendly link you created earlier. You can also test this out on your own by logging out of your Calendly account and visiting your own link.
Here is a step-by-step video tutorial you can follow to create your own calendar:
Set up a Calendly account today and make booking appointments convenient for yourself and your clients. Calendly minimizes the time and effort consumed in booking appointments by offering a simplified platform, where clients can see your availability and book appointments accordingly. However, Calendly can be an even more powerful tool when integrated with other technologies such as AirTable and Zapier.
Step 2: Creating a Base in Airtable
Log into Airtable and create your workspace. Give your workspace a title and click “Create workplace”.
An Airtable base is like an Excel spreadsheet, in this tutorial, it is going to store all the vital information from the appointment booked through Calendly.
Select “Add a base” and click “Start from scratch”.
You can customize the name, colour, and image of the base through the drop down as shown below. Once you have finished, click the base to open the spreadsheet.
When you open the Airtable Spreadsheet it looks very similar to Excel with its rows, columns and overall layout.
The + next to the Attachments column is how you can add headers in Airtable. Double click the column header to type into the cell. You can also change the value of the cell with the drop-down menu. In this case, we are changing “Notes” to “Email Address” and “Long text” to “Email”. We want to create columns that match the questions we have asked in our survey because when we connect Airtable to Calendly it will be able to fill in the correct information.
The columns that follow will be populated with the rest of the information we collect from the client when they schedule an appointment through your Calendly booking system. Use the video tutorial below to get yourself familiar with the steps that follow:
The first service Ruby’s Beauty Salon offers is hair services, so we want to enter all the options available to customers. The format of the cell should be “Multiple select” because it allows customers to choose more than one service. To add services simply type into the cells. This step must be repeated for all the salon services (nail services, hair removal, and specialty services).
After entering all the different services we also included a section for any additional information. This important in a beauty salon to note if anyone has any allergies or special requests.
In addition to entering the survey questions, you can continue to customize the Airtable to fit your business needs. In this case, we would like to know the date the appointment was created and when it is. Click the + to add a new column and double click to rename it “Created Time”. Select the dropdown for the date format.
Once you are finished creating all the headers to store information relevant to your calendar bookings, rename the table by double-clicking the spreadsheet tab. In this case, it has been changed to “Calendly Booking”. And, voila! Your AirTable has been set up to match the questions you asked through Calendly.
Step 3: Connecting Airtable and Calendly
Log into your Calendly account. Under your customized URL select “Integrations” from the drop-down menu.
Copy your API key, we will use this in a moment.
Next, log into Zapier (create and account if you don’t already have one)and select “Make a Zap”. We will be using Zapier to connect Airtable and Calendly.
We will use Calendly as our trigger app, and our trigger will be when an “Invitee Created” an appointment. Click “Save + Continue” to connect.
To connect our Calendly account to Zapier, click “Connect an Account” and paste the API key we copied from Calendly earlier. After connecting we want to test the account to make sure Zapier can access data from Calendly.
If the test is successful, click “Save + Continue” in the bottom right corner.
Next, Zapier will ask you to select a sample. In this case, the sample is someone who has booked an appointment with the salon. If you do not have any responses to your survey you will not have any samples to pull from. Select a sample to continue setting up you Zap.
Now that Calendly is connected to Zapier, it’s time to add Airtable. To do this on the left side of the screen select “Add a Step”.
Choose AirTable as your action app, the action we will use in this tutorial is “Find Record”. We will not create or update record because people will reschedule the appointment or cancel and we want to collect that information as well.
The next step is to connect Airtable and Zapier using Airtable’s API. To do that you will need to go back to the Ruby’s Beauty Salon base you created in Airtable. Navigate to your account settings on AirTable.
Scroll down the page and select “Generate API key”. Copy this key as we will use it shortly.
Return to Zapier and connect Airtable the exact same way we connected Calendly. Click “Test” to ensure Airtable and Zapier are connected. Once it is successful, save and continue to move on.
We are going to use the answers provided by the client when booking an appointment to populate the base created in AirTable. We will be asking AirTable to search our base for a specific name, if it does not already exist, a new record will be created.
In this case, Brittney Spears’ name will be in the first column that is titled Name. Be sure to enter all the information into the Airtable record. Once you click continue, you can view how the information will be gathered in Airtable:
Next, you can test Airtable to see if it will work. Click “Fetch & Continue” to test. If it does not you can go back to the action step and make sure it matches the example above.
The video tutorial below will walk you through everything we did in Step 3: Connecting AirTable and Calendly:
Forecasting with AirTable:
You can further utilize AirTable by using its diverse inventory of tools to create business forecasting based on previous data it received. This can help you get a better understanding of what season in the year you are the most/least busy, and what day of the week you are most likely to have the morning free. Here we use it to predict profits and visualize our data.
On AirTable, navigate to the beauty salon base. In the top right corner select “Blocks” and select “Table”. Blocks allow us to visualize the data, we can see the number of times people have ordered a service.
Select “+Add a block” above or underneath the pie chart, you can select “add a block” to create a pivot table with all the different types of services in one table. You can adjust the pivot table settings to look into different trends. In this case, we want to know if there is a trend between hair and nail service.
Another block we can add is the timeline block to see how scattered the appointments are. In this case, we only have three months’ worth of data but we can still see the middle of April is the busiest time for Ruby’s Beauty Salon.
In addition, your business can also use the blocks SendSMS and SendGrid to text and email your clients when you are offering a discount or to remind them of a recurring appointment.
Step 4: Determine Profits in AirTable
Click the “+” to create a new table within the same base. In this table, you will need a column for services, revenue, cost, and profits. Be sure to format in your preferred currency.
The profit column will need to hold a formula: Revenue-Cost.
Double click “Profit” and select “Customize Field Type” from the drop down menu.
We want to link this column to the Calendly Bookings by clicking “Link to another record” in the drop-down menu.
Once you’ve done this, make sure to click save. Then, click Convert to link to the table.
Return to the Calendly Bookings table to link the Specialty Services Column to the Profits table. Click the “Speciality Services” column header and select “Link to profits” in the drop-down menu. Click “Save”.
Double click the “Speciality Profits” column and change the field type to “Lookup” in the drop-down menu.
We want to tell Airtable to search the Speciality Services Column and match it to the profits in the Profits Table. Select “Speciality Services” and “Profits” from the drop-down menu in the configuration tab.
Repeat the steps above to calculate the profits for all other services. This is what your table should look like:
The finalized table will look like this:
In the top right corner, click “Blocks” and add a chart to represent services and profits. Here we have grouped the specialty services together by profit to show how popular each service is.
With the use of technological tools such as Calendly and AirTable, you too can operate your at home business in ways you could not before.
Through the automations and easy data analysis described above, you can grow your business by building your client base through a booking system that is both convenient to you and to your customers.
Subscription Plans Summary:
Click here for more details on Calendly’s subscription plans.
Click here for more details on Airtable’s subscription plans.
Click here for more details on Zapier’s subscription plans.
Thanks for reading!!
-Noor, Shanty, and Sonia
