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Outlook Calendar app

Invite leads to book meetings with your team, automatically schedule meetings with bots, and more.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over 4 months ago

If you’re chatting with a promising lead, or a high value customer, you can easily invite them to book a meeting with you or your team. 

The Outlook Calendar app allows you to share your availability with your leads, so they can book a meeting with you.

Note:

  • The app will show time slots starting from two hours in the future.

  • The Outlook Calendar app is available with any paid plan with Inbox. You can send Outlook Calendar meeting invites via conversations, Qualify Leads Task Bot and Custom Bots.

Don’t use Outlook? We also have a Google Calendar app. 😉 Read more about it here.

Set up the Outlook Calendar app

First, go to the app store and install the Outlook Calendar app:

Next, select a Microsoft account to connect, and allow Intercom to access your calendar.  

Once connected, you’ll be able to set your available times. By default, your meeting availability is set as ‘Weekdays, 10am-12pm’ and ‘2pm-5pm’. 

It’s easy to add or change your availability for weekdays, weekends, or specific days and times:

Note: The Outlook Calendar app won’t show meeting slots that have been already booked in your calendar. Only your available times will be displayed to leads and customers.

You can also add a video conferencing link and description that will apply to all of your meeting invitations:

Note: Your meeting description has a character limit of 255. If you exceed this limit, your settings won’t save.

Lastly, you can create a personalized URL to share with leads you’re chatting with:

The default meeting duration is 30 minutes. You can also define a different duration by sharing a link that includes a time to the end of the URL:

Note: Meeting slot length can also be configured when sharing the app in a conversation, or sending via a bot.

Book meetings during conversations

Once your calendar is connected, you’ll be able to share the app during conversations. While in a conversation, click on the app icon and select the ‘Outlook Calendar’ app:

To share a meeting invitation, select yourself or a teammate, then choose meeting duration and click ‘Send’:

Your leads can then select from your next available time slots in the Messenger:

If your leads click ‘More times’, they’ll be able to choose from your full list of available calendar slots that week:

Once they choose a time slot, you’ll both receive a notification of the meeting booking.

Show your meeting link in the Messenger

You can display your meeting link in the Messenger, so that leads can book time with you while they're chatting. Just add your link to your Intercom profile:

Now, leads will see a calendar icon while chatting to you in the Messenger, which they can click to see your available slots.

Automatically book meetings with qualified leads

If you qualify inbound leads with the Qualify Leads Task Bot, you can automatically invite them to book meetings with your team. 

To set this up, go to Operator’s Qualify Leads Task Bots

Once you’ve selected your qualification data, add a follow-up: :

Note: The Outlook Calendar app can be used as a follow-up action in both Simple Qualification and Advanced qualification.

When creating your rule, you’ll need to decide what types of qualified leads you’d like to invite to book meetings with. For example, you might want to book meetings with leads with a company size greater than 50. Or, you might only want to speak to leads from a specific industry:

Once you’ve selected the data that will trigger your rule, click ‘Add action’:

Then, choose ‘Send bot message and an app’:

Then, choose the ‘Outlook Calendar’ app from the ‘Insert an app’ list:

You can choose to send meeting invitations evenly from teammates in a specific inbox by round robin, or from a specific teammate:

If you choose a specific team by round robin, the Qualify Leads Task Bot will evenly send invitations from teammates in that team who have their Outlook Calendar connected to Intercom.

If you choose a specific team by round robin, Operator will evenly send invitations from teammates in that team who have their Outlook calendar connected. 

Important: To ensure that the conversation is assigned to the same person as the invitation, you should first add a follow up action to assign the conversation to the same team by round robin.

Send the Outlook Calendar app in chat or post messages

To send the Outlook Calendar app in messages to your customers, just select ‘Insert app’ when composing your message, and the follow the steps listed above: 

Important: Outlook Meetings currently cannot be send via emails.

Changing your availability

You can change your availability, and revoke access to your Outlook Calendar at any time in your meeting settings.

We added the standard GMT timezone concept to the available time slots throughout the customer journey:

  • Standard time zone visible when sending meeting invite.

  • On confirmation page.​

  • When meeting is booked, standard timezone included on the conversation notes


💡Tip

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