Need Appointment Routing?

Here’s a tip for you if your business has multiple employees involved in handling the appointments your clients and prospects set up online.The challenge is this:  How to automatically route those appointments and place them on the calendar of the employee who should be handling the specific customer?

This issues doesn’t apply so much if you’re using Full Slate, but if you’re using TimeTrade, read on.

There are two solutions. First the more expensive TimeTrade solution, and then the lower cost Infusionsoft solution. The key tip is at the very end.

The first is to use the TimeTrade Workgroup edition, at a cost of $99 per user per year. The SmartRouter™ feature of TimeTrade Workgroup allows you to set up rules for routing appointments to different employees. So you have a single appointment setup URL you provide to your clients, and then when the client schedules an appointment TimeTrade looks at the parameters you’ve configured and sends that appointment to the employee you specify.

Here are the steps:

1. The client comes to your website, opts-in and requests an appointment.
2. You provide a TimeTrade appointment URL to the client, either on your website or in a follow up email.
3. The client goes to TimeTrade and provides some information
4. TimeTrade uses the client info to follow your preset rules for assigning the client to an employee.
   The client sees a TimeTrade calendar with appointments that are available according to the calendar of the employee who was assigned.
5. The client sets an appointment, and TimeTrade sends a confirmation to the employee.
   TimeFusion intercepts that appointment confirmation and installs the client as a contact in Infusionsoft (if necessary), installs the appointment in the Infusionsoft calendar and triggers your campaign automation.

The second solution is to use an idea I got from Andrew Bradbury of “The Startup Guys” (www.startupguys.com). With this approach you can use the less expensive versions of TimeTrade: the Pro edition at $49 per user per year, or even the free version.

It’s important to note that each of your employees will have their own TimeTrade account and their own TimeFusion account (or TimeFusion-MultiUser account).

The idea is this: Use the capabilities of Infusionsoft to assign each Client to be owned by the employee who should handle them. (One approach is a round robin.) Then send a different TimeTrade appointment URL to the client – a URL for the TimeTrade account associated with the employee that has been assigned as owner. Here are the steps:

1. The client comes to your website, opts-in and requests an appointment.
2. Your Infusionsoft app uses a round-robin or other technique for assigning the client to be owned by an employee.
3. Your Infusionsoft app sends an email to the client and merged into that email is a TimeTrade appointment URL specific to the employee that owns the client. (See details below)
   The client goes to TimeTrade and sees a TimeTrade calendar with appointments that are available according to the calendar of the employee who was assigned.
4. The client sets an appointment, and TimeTrade sends a confirmation to the employee’s TimeFusion account. TimeFusion receives the appointment confirmation and installs the client as a contact in Infusionsoft (if necessary), installs the appointment in the Infusionsoft calendar and triggers your campaign automation.

So how did the correct appointment URL get merged into that email in step 3? This is the key tip:  Put a TimeTrade appointment URL into the Website field in the Infusionsoft User Record for each employee – this will be an Activity URL from the employee’s TimeTrade account. That Website field can be merged into an email, and with that the correct appointment URL, associated with the employee who owns the client, will be used.

Wa-la!  Low cost appointment routing with TimeTrade, Infusionsoft and TimeFusion!

Thanks again, and your feedback on TimeFusion is always welcome!