Overview

You can reserve specific blocks of time directly in your Office365 or Outlook calendar for certain meeting types. This feature is helpful if you are looking for a way to optimize your work day by committing yourself to specific meetings and tasks throughout the week during specific times.

For Microsoft clients, this feature works both with:

• Outlook Desktop App
• Office365 Web Client

Requires the latest version of the Outlook Add-In.

Outlook Desktop App

For this example, let's assume you want to optimize your calendar to only take Customer Support calls on Monday from 1:00PM to 5:00PM in your time zone. So, what you can do is create a block on your calendar that will reserve this timeframe for Customer Support calls. 

Steps as shown above: 

1. Create a new Appointment on your calendar.
   1. Give it a name that you or someone else can easily recognize.
2. Open the Appointment and click on the "Reserve Time" button in the top toolbar.
3. Search or select the meeting type to reserve the time for and click "Reserve Time" at the bottom. 
4. Change "Show As" from "Busy" to "Free".
5. "Save and Close" the Appointment. 

Now that this appointment slot has been reserved, when your customers view your public booking link for this meeting type, they will only see the times available that you have reserved. 

Similarly, if your co-worker is scheduling an appointment on your behalf with this meeting type via the Chili Piper Chrome Extension, they will only see the times available in which you have reserved. 

Office365 Web Client

Similar to the Outlook Desktop App, you can also reserve times within the Office365 Web Client.

For this example, let's assume you want to reserve Wednesday's from 9:00AM-12:00PM for Inbound Demos. 

The steps for Office365 Web Client are very similar to using the Desktop App but you'll notice that instead of a button that says, "Reserve Time", you'll simply see the orange Chili Piper calendar icon at the top when you have the appointment opened. When you click on it within the Appointment, you should see a drop-down with 2 options: "Reassign" & "Reserve Time". Clicking "Reserve Time" will open the module on the right side of the page, enabling you to reserve this time just as you would in the Outlook Desktop App. 

Don't forget to set "Show as:" to "Free" so that Chili Piper will see this time as available for this meeting type!

A few notes:

• You can verify that your Reserved Times are working correctly by opening an online booking link associated to this Meeting Type or opening the Instant Booker via your Chrome Extension and selecting your reserved Meeting Type from the list of available Meeting Types. 
• Appointments with Reserved Time can be made recurring to enable users to do things like setting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday available from 9:00AM-12:00PM for certain meeting types.
  • This is currently only supported with Google Calendar. Support for Microsoft coming soon. Email support@chilipiper.com more details. 
• Overlapping Reserved Times is supported in case you want to reserve times within the same time frame for both "Inbound Demos" and "Discovery Calls". 
• Reserving time for 1 Meeting Type does not necessarily prevent another meeting of a different type from being booked during the time you have reserved. If you need to handle this situation, you will want to reserve the times on your calendar for each of the different meeting types you use.
• For Admins, you can view the reserved times of each of your reps plus their utilization of their reserved times by navigating to the following: https://apps.chilipiper.com/report-template
  • This is currently only supported with Google Calendar. Support for Microsoft coming soon. Email support@chilipiper.com for more details. 
• If you have reserved times for different meeting types in the past but you have not reserved times in the future, this will be okay. Your full calendar availability will be displayed in this case based on the working hours you have set within your Personal Calendar Settings.