Speaker 1: Microsoft 365 has its own online booking and scheduling application that is included in your license and it's called Microsoft Bookings. In this video, I'm going to show you how it can save time and improve automation in your business. But before we start, a quick introduction as always. My name is Jonathan Edwards and my company looks after your Microsoft 365 anti-cyber security. Microsoft 365 has so many unknown and underutilized free applications that you're already paying for in your license. One of these applications that I hardly see any businesses use is called Microsoft Bookings. Microsoft Bookings is a little bit like another application called Calendly. If you use that, Bookings is similar. Microsoft Bookings comes included with Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Premium and Enterprise plans. So there's a good chance that you've got access to it. So how would you use Microsoft Bookings in your business? Well, have you ever been in a position where you're trying to arrange a meeting with a customer, a prospect or a partner and you just can't agree a time? How much time do you waste? Hey, how about arranging that meeting for Monday at two o'clock? Sorry, I'm on holiday on Monday. What about Tuesday at four o'clock? I'm finishing early on Tuesday. I've got the kids to pick up. How long does it take to set up a meeting? Surely it'd be better if you could just send a link by email saying, hey, book a convenient time in the calendar. Nice and easy. But Bookings does much more than that. You might have a high street shop like a hair salon. You could create a Bookings page for your hair salon. You could list all of your services and then people could go online and book an appointment. You could even embed the Bookings page on your company website. You could even set Bookings to send people reminders by email, say a day before saying, you've got a beard trim tomorrow, don't forget. And you could even follow up with people after they've had their hair cut saying, how was your haircut? You can add all of this automation to your business using Bookings. Now I've given you a few examples, but I think the best way that I can show you Bookings is to show you it. So let's jump onto the computer behind me now and I'll give you a demo on how you can use Microsoft Bookings in your business. So firstly, how do you access Bookings? Well, the first way is you can log into 365 over the web and you can look at all your applications and you can see Bookings is there. You can also just open a web browser and type in book.ms and that will also take you to Bookings. So this is my Booking page here and you can see that there are two sections. There's a personal Booking page and there's a shared Booking page. So let's go through each of those individually. So the first one is the personal one. If I go to my Booking page. So this is my personal Booking page. So I'm going to show you a few things on here. Firstly, we can change this banner if we want. Just change the way it looks. We can choose something different if we're not happy with that one. But the most important things on this page are these two things here. We've got public and we've got private. So firstly, I can list kind of a public meeting, a public service. So I go on here like this and I might put something here like a discovery call. I can add a description, chat to Jonathan about anything to do with IT. What we can also do here, we can turn the Teams meeting on and off. Now if it's on, along with the meeting invite, there'll be also a Teams link. So that's really handy. We can then set the duration. So we've got all these here. We've got 15, 30, 45 or we can customize it in minutes. So I'm just going to select this at 30 minutes. It's public. So anybody can see this with the link and it's meant for people outside of the organization. So down here, we've got a section called schedule customization. Now the default setting is use my regular meeting hours. So you might be thinking, well, what are my regular meeting hours? Well, you've got a little tab here next to it. And if you click on that, it'll open the settings, your calendar settings in Outlook. So it says here that your work week is Monday to Friday, eight till five. Now you might be thinking, I don't want people to be able to book one of these discovery calls, Monday to Friday, eight till five. I want to limit it a little bit. So what you do is you click on this arrow here and you say, use customized availability hours. And then within that, you've got some start and end dates. So you can say, well, actually this discovery call, it's just for a limited period. So I'm going to choose a start and an end date. But if you don't take that, you can simply say, I want these discovery calls only on a Monday morning, nine till 12. Around that time, people just can't book them. So you just amend your calendar here to suit. So you'd put nine till 12 in there. So that would mean that people can only book this discovery call on a Monday between nine and 12. And if it's booked up, they'll be offered the following Monday. And then we've got some more advanced options. So we'll click on here. We've got these settings here, which I think are quite handy. It's called a buffer time before meeting. So if you set this at zero, you could be back to back with meetings. People could book a meeting and then straight afterwards, someone can have another meeting. You might be thinking, well, after one of these discovery calls, it's half an hour long. I need another half an hour just to go to the toilet and have a cup of coffee. So I'm going to have a buffer time at either side of 30 minutes. That means I'm just not going to be back to back with meetings. So that's a really good setting. And then also the limit start time too. I want these in 30 minute intervals. I don't want someone booking a meeting at five past the hour or 10 past the hour. I want them to be in good 30 minute intervals. So one o'clock, half past one, two o'clock, things like that. You can also change that to hour or 20 minutes if you want. But I think 30 minutes is a decent setting. In terms of the lead time here, again, another good setting. You might have a lead time of 24 hours because actually if someone books a discovery call, you need a day to be able to plan for that call. If you have this just set one hour, it means on a Monday morning, someone could book a call at nine o'clock for 10 o'clock and you might not have enough time to prepare for that. But again, the setting's fairly flexible. And again, lead time, the maximum lead time, the default is 90 days. That means people can book a meeting, a discovery call with you up to 90 days in advance. So about three months. So again, another good setting. Once we've finished that, we can save it. So there we have our first meeting. So to share that with someone, I simply get the link. I can copy a link here. I can click on share. But if I copy a link, and then if we just open this in a different browser, copy that into Outlook, you can see there that I can send this to people and they can sign in if they've got a 365 or they can simply continue as guest and they can book this session. So they can click on here. You can see my diary here. Now I'm away this week. So this 22nd, the Monday the 22nd isn't available, but they can book any times. And you can see the 9.30 to 12, because that's what I've set it to in the backend. So they would simply click on that, click next. They can type their name, their email and any notes. And that is how they will book a discovery call with me. You can see here, I can have lots of different services. So I've just set up one at the moment. I can easily create another one. That might be a discovery call for an hour, or it might be something completely different. Whatever my meetings are about, I can create those services. Now we've got a different section here called private. And it says here, only those with the link can view. So this is actually a public facing bookings page. So it means anybody can really view this if they've got the link. With this, you usually have to send them the link. So it says here, only people with the booking link can view this. And these will appear on your public booking page. So that is the difference between those two. So at a minimum, I think every business, if you're in a corporate world, if you're an accountant, a law firm should be using this. It just reduces the friction when you're trying to book a meeting with someone. It stops you going to and fro trying to arrange your time. You just simply say, look, here's my link to my booking page. Book a convenient time in my calendar. So if that's the personal one, if we click on back here, we've also got some shared booking pages. So what are shared booking pages? The best way to demonstrate it is just to show you. So let's go and create a new shared booking page. So we're going to create one from scratch. Let's pretend we're something like a hair salon. So we'll call this Jonathan's Hair Salon. Choose the business type. You can choose what we want. So let's call it health care. And you can choose your business hours. Let's say we open it at 9 o'clock in the morning. So they're our business hours. We can even add a logo in here if we want. So we can do that quite easily. And we click on next. We then look at the staff who are part of this booking page. So what you choose is all your hairdressers. Let's pretend that Simon is a hairdresser. He's not, but let's pretend he is. And there's some services here. So you can set these up later. And that's what I'm going to do. So I click on next. And then we've got some settings here. So you can have a shared booking page just for internal use. So you might have different departments and you might have a shared booking page for like the marketing department if you want to set meetings that way. Or if this is our hairdressers, we want it really for anyone because it's a public facing page. We'll then click on create. And it will set up our booking page. Okay, Jonathan's Hair Salon is now ready to take bookings. How exciting. So if we just look at that page now, I'll copy that link again into Chrome. You can see that here is our booking page. Now at the moment, it looks a little bit bland. So let's just go into the back end and we will get started. So let's take a few things here. So first of all, we can fill in the business information. If we click on the drop down, you can put the address, the currency we're dealing, our website. So we'll put that in here. I mean, this is a hair salon. I've got the wrong URL, but that's okay. We can also put terms and conditions in there. As I said earlier, we can upload a logo. We can change our business hours. And you've also got some integrations you can do as well. But I think one of the most important things is the services page. I can just click on discard changes. It was just the website that I updated, in fact. So I'll go back and do that. I click save. Okay, click save. But I think the most important page of all is our services page. Okay, we've got this default one here, which we'll delete in a moment. But let's pretend we've got our hair salon. So we add a new service. And the first service I'm going to call is a beard trim. Okay, so we put beard trim in there. We could have a beard trim for gents. The location, we will put our address in there. Of course, it's not an online meeting because you need to be present when you're having a beard trim. But if it was an online meeting, you just select this to on. A beard trim lasts 30 minutes. That's okay. The buffer time, we can say, well, we want 15 minutes between each appointment because, you know, we might want to go to the toilet, make ourselves a drink. And we can also put here the price. So we've got some options here. It could be free, but we don't really give free beard trims. We're going to say it's a fixed price of £25. Okay, put any notes in there. Obviously, the maximum number of attendees is just one because we can only do one beard trim at once. And this is a helpful option here. It says let customers manage their appointment. So what it means, if we switch this on, once a customer's booked an appointment, they can go back into it. They can amend the time. They can reschedule. They can cancel. They can do all those things. So I think that is a really good idea. And then we've got some options up here. So we've got some availability options. So again, it's a little bit like the personal page that I showed you. We've got increments. We've got lead time. We've got maximum lead time. We can change all those there. And again, just like the personal one, we can book when staff are free. So this will link to their Outlook calendars. And when they're free, it will open up on bookings. We can make it not bookable for certain times, or we can customise it. So we might say we only do beard trims on a Saturday, for example. So that's how that works there. Assign staff. So we might have certain hairdressers who can do beard trims. Some hairdressers can't. So what we would do, well, me and Simon, we can both do beard trims. So that's OK. Again, we've selected single here. It might be that some kind of haircuts need multiple staff. So again, they can select multiple staff there. You get the idea. Then on customised fields, what do we want when the person books it? Well, we want the person's email. We want their phone number. We don't really want their customer address. And they don't really need to make any notes. But I'll switch this on anyway so I can show you in the end. We can also add a customised field. Something like, I don't know, this is a real bad example. Something like that. Save changes. So that could be another question we could ask. And then we can click on notifications. And we've got various options here. Notify the business via email when a booking is created. That's handy. So we'll get an email when someone makes a booking. And also, we can send a meeting invite to the customer once they've booked. Again, that's a nice idea because then they can pop it into their calendars. We've also got some email reminders down here. So I like this. It means that people are just constantly reminded of it. So a day before, at the moment, they will get an email to say, just a quick reminder that your service is coming up soon. We can pop in there and we can change it. So a quick reminder that your beard trim is tomorrow. We can also add another one an hour before and say, just a reminder, in an hour's time, you've got your beard trim. And again, just down below here, another really useful feature. After the event, so after you've had your beard trim, a day later or 15 minutes later in this instance, you could send an email saying, how was it? Did you have a good beard trim? Can you rate us? And also, would you like to book your next appointment? So again, this is all automation and it's just helping to improve your business. Once you've finished that, you can click on save changes and we've got a beard trim listed here. So I'm just going to delete this one now. It won't let me delete it before because there was only one. So I can delete that. So what I'll do as well, I'm just going to pause the video and I'm going to add a few more services in here just to show you the end result. So let me just go and pause the video now. Okay, so I've added a few more services in here. So our hair salon, it does ponytail tidies, it does perms and it does beard trims. It's a real good hair salon. So what we've also got here, if we go to a booking page, we've got some more options. We can see the link of our booking page. So I'll just show you what that looks like at the moment. Copy into here. You can see here when people go to it, they can choose a service. So if they choose a beard trim, for example, they can then select the staff dropdown. They can choose who they want to do their beard trim. They can then choose a date. So if they choose me, you can see that I'm out of the office these two days. So this integrates with my own personal calendar and they can say, right, I want it at 9.15 on the 11th and then they add the details in here. Okay, so there's all the details we can add in there. Then if we look at perm, you've noticed there's no setting here for the person to choose who they want to do their perm. If we just hop back to the services page, go into perm, you can see on assigned staff that is not turned on. So they get no option. Likewise, if we go to a ponytail tidy on assigned staff, customers can choose, but there's only me. So if we go on to a ponytail tidy here, you can see there's just me in this list. So you can really kind of choose the settings you want for your page. Now it looks a bit bland at the moment. So there's some more settings in the booking page. If we go down to customize page, we can change the color of things. We can change various things, or we can choose the hex colors of our logo and things. And there's also an option to display your business logo. So that will change how it looks. You've also got some bits and pieces here. Disable search engines. If you don't want Google to crawl your booking page and list it in the search engine results, you can check it there. And you can also improve the security by requiring one-time passwords. It's like 2FA for creating bookings. In terms of the default scheduling policy, what we can do, these increments that we've talked about, we can set them at a page level, or we can set them separately as on a service level. So you can do them as a whole or with separate services. And the last thing I want to show you in here is the calendar. So when people start to booking, you will see your calendar filling up. So it's perfect for like a hair salon or anything like that. You'll be able to see all your appointments that are scheduled to happen today. And depending on what mode you have it in, you might have it in the month mode, you can see all of your appointments. So that in a nutshell is Microsoft bookings. So there you have it. There is Microsoft bookings. Every business should be using bookings, even if you use it just to reduce the friction when you're trying to book meetings with people. Or if you've got a shop or a consultancy, you can have a shared booking page. I hope you've enjoyed this video. Look forward to seeing you again soon.