Comm100 Booking is an online solution designed for businesses to manage the process of appointment scheduling with their customers. The solution allows customers to book a meeting with you by choosing from your available time slots, eliminating the need of back-and-forth emails for confirming availability. The streamlined scheduling process increases team efficiency and productivity, and brings a better user experience.

Comm100 Booking allows you to design booking pages for services and for individual agents. Visitors can book a meeting with you through a service booking page or directly with a specified agent.

On a booking page for services, your website visitors can choose a service type and then choose a time slot and an available agent by themselves.

On a booking page for an individual agent, website visitors can directly schedule a meeting with the specified agent.

With Comm100 Booking, you can:

• Customize your Booking pages: incorporate your brand color, logo, and other branding images for a unified user experience.
• Define various service types: define different service types for the meetings you need to schedule, including the meeting duration, available agents and other scheduling rules.
• Send personalized appointment notifications: send automatic notifications to team members and customers upon an appointment booking, cancellation, rescheduling, or completion.
• Manage your team’s schedule: set up working hours and holidays for the services and agents.

To use Comm100 Booking, administrators need to create a booking page first. This article describes the procedure to create and set up the booking page:

1. Creating a booking page
2. Creating a Service
3. Setting up the Service
4. Setting up an agent page

To learn more about how agents can manage scheduled appointments, see this article.

Booking pages are webpages where your customers can book an appointment with you. One booking page can contain multiple Services. If your organization has multiple branches or departments, you can create multiple booking pages so that each of them can have a distinctive booking webpage.

To create a booking page, follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Comm100 Control Panel.
2. From the left navigation menu, go to Booking > Booking Pages.
   
3. On the Booking Pages page, click New Booking Page.
4. Give the booking page a name. The name appears as the heading of the webpage.
   
5. Complete the settings for the booking page to keep consistent branding.
   1. Upload a logo.
   2. Choose the theme color.
   3. Input the greeting message to show on the booking page.
6. Click Save. The booking page is created successfully.

After the booking page is created, you can create service types that your customers may need.

Services are various types of meetings that your customers may want to schedule with you, such as a product demo, a 30-minute consultation phone call, and so on. Each service has a dedicated webpage that can be accessed by customers to make an appointment. You can define the meeting duration, appointment notification and assign agents for each service separately.

To create a Service, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, go to Booking > Services.
   
2. On the Services page, click New Service.
3. Input the service name, set the color, booking page, and duration for the service.
   
   Note: 

   • The color defined for the service is used to display the service on agents’ calendar, so that agents can easily distinguish among different service types.
     
   • One service can be associated with one booking page only. However, one booking page can contain multiple services.
4. Click Save. A service is created successfully.

Before launching a booking page, you need to complete the service settings including defining the information to collect from visitors, assigning agents, setting service availability, and so on. After completing the settings, you can get and implement the link of the service page or the booking page that the service belongs to on your website to make it accessible to your customers.

Set Up the Service Page

The service page is a webpage dedicated to a service through which your customers can book an appointment. You can customize the information collection form, assign agents, and define other scheduling rules such as whether to allow visitors to choose a particular agent.

• A service page can be disabled. When disabled, the service disappears from the booking page that it belongs to, and the link of the service page cannot be accessed.
• By default, a service page requires customers to provide information, such as name and email before making an appointment. You can customize the information items to collect from customers.
• You need to assign agents to a service to make the service bookable for customers. If you create a service and do not assign agents to the service, customers will see a notice on the service page that the service does not accept any appointments.
• You can define the following scheduling rules for each service separately:
  1. Minimum Lead Time
     How close to the meeting time that customers can make or cancel an appointment. For example, if the Minimum Lead Time is 24 hours, your customers can only book or cancel an appointment 24 hours in advance. The default value is 1 day.
  2. Maximum Lead Time
     How far in advance of the meeting time customers can make an appointment. The default value is 30 days.
  3. Allow Visitor to Choose Particular Agent
     Whether to allow visitors to choose a specified agent by themselves. When disabled, the system assigns the appointments to agents by following load balancing rules. This option is disabled by default.
  4. Allow Visitor to Cancel Appointment
     Whether to allow visitors to cancel a scheduled appointment. This option is enabled by default.
  5. Limit Appointments Per Visitor
     Whether to limit appointments for each visitor based on specified constraints per day/week/month or any future timeframe. The system identifies visitors using the Phone or Email field value, excluding canceled appointments. This option is disabled by default.
  6. Pre-Appointment Email Remind Time
     The amount of time before the appointment to send the reminder email to customers.

To set up the service page, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, go to Booking > Services > Service Page.
   Note: If you have multiple service pages, make sure to choose the correct one from the drop-down list.
   
2. (Optional) Perform the following operations based on your requirements:
   1. If you need to implement the service page separately, copy the webpage link.
   2. To change the theme of the service page, click Go to Set to change the settings for the booking page that the service belongs to.
3. Edit the information fields that you want to collect from your visitors. You can set the fields as required or visible, or add new fields to the form.
   
4. Choose the agents for the service.
   
5. Set the scheduling rules for service.
   
   
6. Click Save.

Set Up Service Availability

Service availability defines when the service is available for customers to schedule a meeting. Service availability can be based on agent availability only or a combination of agent availability and custom service availability.

• Based on agent availability only
  The available time slot of the service is determined by the working hours and blocked times of all the assigned agents.
• Based on agent availability and custom service availability
  The available time slot of the service is determined by the availability of all the assigned agents and the customized service availability, including working hours and holidays.

To set service availability, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, go to Booking > Services > Availability.
   Note: If you have multiple services, make sure to choose the correct one from the drop-down list.
   
2. On the Availability page, choose the availability type according to your requirements.
   
3. If you choose the Bookable based on agent and custom service availability type, set the working hours and holidays.
   
4. Click Save.

Edit Visitor-Side Text and Messages

You can modify all the language items on the booking webpage throughout the scheduling process, including the button text on the booking page, the notice when an appointment is booked, cancelled, and so on.

To modify visitor-side language items, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, go to Booking > Services > Language.
   Note: If you have multiple service pages, make sure to choose the correct one from the drop-down list.
   
2. On the Language page, modify the language items based on your needs.
   
3. Click Save.

Customize Email Notifications

Comm100 Booking allows you to send email notifications to both customers and agents when an appointment is created, rescheduled, cancelled, and so on. Comm100 provides email notification samples for the following occasions, which you can customize according to your needs.

• Email to the visitor when an appointment is created
• Email to the agent when an appointment is created
• Email to the visitor when an appointment is rescheduled
• Email to the agent when an appointment is rescheduled
• Email to the visitor when an appointment is cancelled
• Email to the agent when an appointment is cancelled
• Email to the visitor when the visitor does not show for the scheduled appointment
• Email to the agent when the visitor does not show for the scheduled appointment
• Email reminder to the visitor before the scheduled appointment

To customize the email notifications, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, go to Booking > Services > Notification.
   Note: If you have multiple service pages, make sure to choose the correct one from the drop-down list.
   
2. On the Notification page, click the edit icon against the email notification you want to edit.
   
   A predefined notification email appears from the right-side drawer.
3. On the right-side drawer, modify the email subject or content based on your needs.
   
   Note:

   • The dynamic information contained in the email will be replaced by the actual value when being sent. For example, {!Service Name} will be replaced by the service's actual name.
   • You can insert agent-specific information, such as agents' name, bio, and meeting URL into the notification email. Agents' information needs to be updated from your Control Panel > Global Settings > Agents.
     
4. Click Save.

All agents that have been assigned a service have a dedicated webpage that can be accessed to schedule a meeting. Each agent’s webpages can be customized separately to show a personalized profile to customers. You can also define each agent’s availability separately.

To customize the agent pages, follow these steps:

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, go to Booking > Agent Pages. The page lists all the agents with their assigned services.
   
2. Click the edit icon against the agent you want to edit.
   Note:  If a target agent does not appear in the list, you need to assign a service to the agent first.
3. Under the General tab, complete the settings for the agent page.
   
   1. Upload a logo.
   2. Choose a theme color.
   3. Edit the greeting message to show on the agent page.
4. Click the Availability tab, edit the working hours, available services and add the blocked times when the agent will be unavailable.
   
   Note: 

   • When the agent is assigned to a new service, the new service will be automatically added to the Available Services. Agent can customize available services for each time segment based on their schedule.
   • When the agent is removed from a service, the service will be automatically removed from Available Services.
   
   
   
5. Click Save. The agent page is set up successfully.

1. On the Comm100 Control Panel, go to Booking > Agent Pages, and click the Calendar Account tab.
   
   
2. In the Connect Calendar area, click Connect. The Exchange Account drawer appears from the right side.
3. On the Exchange Account drawer, input your User Info and Server Info.
4. Click Save.

How Comm100 Safeguards Exchange Calendar Integration Credentials

1. Secure Transmission: During the integration process, after entering the required details to connect your Exchange calendar to the Comm100 Booking platform, your information is transmitted to our servers using SSL 1.2 encryption.
2. Database Encryption: Upon arrival at our servers, we encrypt the password in our secure database using the AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
3. Decryption in Memory: When we need to access to your Exchange calendar information, we decrypt the password in memory. Importantly, we do not store your decrypted details anywhere, ensuring the protection of your privacy throughout the process.

Integration Privacy Overview

1. Information Retrieval: The Comm100 Booking system ensures real-time synchronization with your Exchange Calendar, retrieving events and availability to maintain accurate calendar availability. For example, it fetches event names and schedules to allow agents to view their appointments accurately in the Comm100 Agent Console. When customers check available time slots on the booking page, the system cross-references your calendar's event time, displaying only the available slots to prevent double booking.
2. Data Storage: No Exchange Calendar meeting data is stored in the Comm100 Booking system. The system dynamically checks and retrieves meeting details in real-time, and external exchange meeting details are not retained in the Comm100 database.
3. Access Restrictions: For privacy considerations, an agent can only access their own Exchange Calendar meetings once a calendar connection is established. Agents are not granted access to the meeting details of other agents.
4. Scope of Integration: Comm100 Booking is exclusively designed to access and synchronize calendar data, focusing on checking availability, managing appointments, and updating your calendar with Comm100 bookings. It does not have access to other information, such as email content.