Archive for the 'Doodle features' Category

BookMe News

May 23, 2013

Our latest release brings the following improvements to BookMe:

  • The admin interface for BookMe has been revamped completely. The new interface makes it much easier to set up a new BookMe page or configure an existing page.
  • The “Book now” button in the very first step of the BookMe process is now always shown with each service in order to ensure that your customers don’t miss it.
  • Similarly, we have improved the bread-crumb navigation in the BookMe process to make sure that your customers will follow through to the very end of the process.
  • With the “Manually accept” booking mode, BookMe will now only send confirmations after you have explicitly accepted an appointment request by a customer.
  • Last but not least, appointment requests can now be accepted or rejected directly from the e-mails that BookMe sends out. This is a great feature to manage your appointments on the go.

ManageBookMe

Better printing, preferred option, fixed Kaspersky

April 3, 2013

Here are the feature highlights of today’s Doodle release:

  • Doodle is about reaching consensus on when is the best time to meet. We try to support this process as much as possible. Today, we introduced a small indication that highlights the currently preferred option (Screenshot). We hope that this will incentivize participants to make this option happen.
  • Better printing: While we suggest to save paper and follow the status of your Doodle polls online only, many of our users wish to print the information once a poll is closed. Now you can print Doodle polls directly from your browser, e.g. pressing ctrl+p. You no longer need to print via the PDF export. Update: Due to popular demand, we rolled back this feature and re-introduced the old PDF functionality on April 24 2013.
  • Many of our users who use the Kaspersky security suite had troubles using Doodle recently. We have introduced a fix for the problem and hope it resolves the issues. Let us know if it does — or doesn’t.

BookMe: New features and success stories

March 25, 2013

We’ve added a couple of new features to BookMe:

  • Locations are now optional. This enables virtual companies with no physical locations to also use BookMe.
  • Buffer times: Certain businesses need buffer times before and/or after an appoinment to clean or prepare for the next customer. Such buffer times can now be set individually for each service in BookMe.
  • Lead times define the minimal time span between booking an appointment and the actual appointment to take place. This allows you as the business owner to prevent overly short-term appointments.

And we’ve asked some of our customers about BookMe. Here’s what they say:

  • Eurocentres says: ”The first BookMe appointment came in on the first day of offering the new service – and the number of appointments by potential customers from around the world is growing daily.” Learn more
  • Float says: “30%-50% of all appointments are booked through BookMe. Oscar Trott estimates that the center is spending six to eight hours a week less on the phone.” Learn more

Daylight Saving Time Explained

March 6, 2013

Many–if not most–regions of the world use daylight saving time (summer time) for about half a year. For example, Eastern Standard Time (EST), which is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) minus 5 hours (GMT-5:00), becomes Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), which is GMT minus 4 hours (GMT-4:00); and the time in Western Europe (e.g., Zurich) goes from GMT+1:00 to GMT+2:00.

When creating a Doodle poll, the poll creator can set a time zone so that the times she chooses for the poll options are with respect to that time zone. However, Doodle seems to only offer time zones for winter time. For example, “(GMT-5:00) EST” is available, but “(GMT-4:00) EDT” seems not to be; “(GMT+1:00) Zurich” is available, but “(GMT+2:00) Zurich” seems not to be. Furthermore, a poll’s options might feature both dates that lie in winter time and dates that lie in summer time.

So what are poll creators and poll participants supposed to do? First and foremost, don’t worry! Simply choose the “normal” time zone for your region without concern for the current time or the dates & times of the respective poll. For example, a user in New York always chooses “(GMT-5:00) EST” while a user in Zurich always chooses “(GMT+1:00) Zurich”. Behind the curtain, Doodle (or rather the Java platform that Doodle is based on) does its summer-time magic if need be.

Here’s an example: http://doodle.com/ehbn7guem4tq4m4f. A company with an office in New York and an office in Zurich wants all employees to be on a conference call. An employee from the New York office sets a Doodle poll up, always suggesting 9 to 11 AM.

Example poll set to New York time

Most of the year, the time difference between New York and Zurich is 6 hours (GMT-5 -> GMT+1 or GMT-4 -> GMT+2), so 9 to 11 AM typically becomes 3 to 5 PM. However, daylight saving time begins one week earlier in New York and ends one week later, so for two weeks per year, the time difference is only 5 hours (GMT-4 -> GMT+1) and 9 to 10 AM becomes 2 to 4 PM during those two weeks (cf. March 11 and 13 as well as October 28 and 30).

Example poll set to Zurich time

None of the users has to worry about that, either, as Doodle takes care of any and all necessary conversions. And everybody is on the same call at the right time!

How to connect Doodle with Outlook 2013 or Outlook.com

February 26, 2013

Connecting your calendar with Doodle has a number of advantages. Watch the video at the end of this post to learn more about them.

Many of our users ask us how to connect Doodle with Outlook 2013 or with Outlook.com. And here’s how:

Update: Please refer to our extensive support section on that topic.

Let us know what your experience is. Either in the comments or via http://doodle.com/about/contact.html.

Great service for the customer: Doodle BookMe in action at Eurocentres

February 11, 2013

Our new booking service BookMe has been in operation for five months, and many companies have jumped on board. BookMe enables smaller service providers to offer their customers a fast and convenient way to book appointments online.

We want to know how our new offer is being received in daily business. Who is using BookMe and for what purpose? A few weeks ago, we reported on float Zurich. Today, we look at how Eurocentres’ language schools are using our new service.

The company

With 35 schools on five continents and teaching in eight languages, Eurocentres has been offering language courses for more than 60 years. Every year, all around the world, about 13,000 people learn a new language with Eurocentres.

The direct sales of the global courses are organized by an international team based in Zurich, primarily through e-commerce activities and personal phone calls.

Why BookMe?

Eurocentres offers its customers a free service number for advice on suitable courses and to book the selected courses over the phone. The disadvantage of this approach is that the large number of customer requests can lead to long waiting times — especially at peak periods.

To prevent this and to operate a more efficient phone sales system, Eurocentres has long been searching for a suitable callback service solution. Being an international company, the ability to provide this service in several languages was a crucial requirement. BookMe fulfilled its expectations exactly and Eurocentres implemented the new service in October 2012.

Experience with BookMe

In addition to the phone service, Eurocentres customers can now place a callback request directly through the company’s website with BookMe. A particularly popular function among customers is the ability to specify a date for the callback.

Michel Sägesser, head of E-Commerce and ICT Services at Eurocentres, is convinced of its benefits: “If you want to receive advice on our language courses, all you have to do is choose a free appointment on our BookMe schedule. It even works across time zones. Customers can prepare themselves beforehand and rely on the time of the callback. With BookMe, not only are we providing a new service, we are also ensuring that potential customers are not lost through the waiting queue.

The first BookMe inquiry came on the first day of offering the new service – and the number of recall bookings by potential customers from around the world is growing daily. Eurocentres’ employees are convinced of BookMe’s benefits, while Michel Sägesser is certain that the potential of the new callback service is far from exhausted:

“Our busiest season is spring, when most of the courses are booked for the summer holidays. The advantages that BookMe brings to our daily work will become even more obvious then.

Duplicating polls

January 31, 2013

One frequent feature request of our users was the ability to copy an existing poll to reuse its settings and some of the content to organize a new instance of a recurring event — e.g., a weekly soccer training or a monthly board meeting.

Yesterday, we’ve added this little feature. It’s called “create a duplicate” in the screenshot below.

The screenshot also shows you all the other things you can do with a Doodle poll, most notably “close”: Please don’t forget to close your polls when they’re done. You’ll be able to select the final date and time and prevent the poll from being edited further. All calendar-integrated users will be especially thankful to you because fixing the final date will free up all tentative events in their calendars and only block the final date.

PollAdminFunctions

How to integrate your Facebook events with Doodle

January 3, 2013

Integrating your Facebook events in Doodle can have two major advantages:

  • You get reminded of events you might want or plan to attend while scheduling.
  • You prevent scheduling some other event/meeting when one of your Facebook events takes place.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Register for a (free!) Doodle account, if you don’t have one yet: http://doodle.com/open.
  2. Visit your Facebook events list: https://www.facebook.com/events/list.
  3. Click on the cogwheel in the upper right corner and select “Export”.
  4. Choose either your friends’ birthdays or upcoming events (or both, if you wish), right-click on the respective link and choose “copy link address”.
  5. Visit the calendar settings in your Doodle account: https://doodle.com/mydoodle/manageAccount.html#calendars.
  6. Paste the link you copied above into the “calendar feed URLs” textfield.
  7. Make sure to replace the “webcal:” at the very beginning of the URL with “http:”.
  8. Click “Add”.

From now on, whenever you create a new scheduling poll or participate in a poll, you can choose to use the calendar view and have your Facebook events displayed.

Please let us know if you use this feature or if some other form of Facebook integration might make sense for you.

BookMe Improved

December 5, 2012

Our latest product BookMe allows 24/7 customer appoint scheduling. BookMe is already used by hundreds of businesses such as hairdressers, driving schools, language centers, beauty and wellness studios, etc.

Of course we receive a lot of feedback from these users, and they result in improvements for the product. Here are the latest goodies:

Approval process: BookMe now supports two approval modes:

  • “Automatically accept new appointments”: Every new appointment request by a customer will be accepted by BookMe — and can always be declined again later on. This is the perfect option if your calendar is always up-to-date and you don’t have time to check your BookMe requests regularly.
  • “Manually accept or deny appointment requests”: New appointments are tentative only — you have to accept them first. This is the perfect option if you are always on top of your BookMe requests and wish to have the final say about which appointment to take and when.

Timezones: BookMe now supports timezones. A crucial feature for all our international customers: In your BookMe settings, you can now define a timezone for your business (in the location dialogue). All times will then be interpreted for that timezone.

Free services don’t mention payments: A couple of our users rightfully complained that BookMe emphasizes in the user interface that a customer will be required to pay for the service even if said service is free. The respective message is now suppressed if a service is free.

That’s it for now. But we have a long roadmap for upcoming releases. What are your priorities? Let us know!

BookMe Approval ProcessBookMe Timezones

Revamped Sign-In and Sign-Up

November 27, 2012

With the latest release, Doodle features a whole new sign in and sign up experience. Our objectives for the redesign were the following:

  • Make the process as seamless and user-friendly as possible.
  • Allow our users to sign in and create an account any time without losing the current state of their work.
  • Improve third-party sign-ups via Facebook and Google.

The accounts themselves remain unchanged. As always, they are completely optional, but they enable a number of advanced features:

  • All your scheduling activity at a glace in a central dashboard,
  • the ability to connect your calendar to Doodle for even more efficient scheduling,
  • the possibility to easily invite your participants directly from Doodle.
Creating a new account

Creating a new account

Signing into an existing account

Signing into an existing account

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