Clarity has advanced functionality that allows external users (think email recipients) to schedule a meeting with you without the need for you to have the conversation such as “here are some of my available times” and you send back a listing of 3 or 4 time slots and they send 3 or 4 and you find common ground. Instead, give your email recipients the ability to schedule time directly with you, while you move onto the next customer, through a URL you generate and place into your email signature!
Of course, you have all the power so if you need to tweak the meeting agenda, attach a document or make any kind of updates it’s all stored on your calendar and you have full ability to do so.
To Set Up Clarity Scheduler
You’ll first need to authenticate with Clarity so that we know you have access to this and what Outlook calendar to be looking at for availability. To confirm if you have authenticated with Clarity, please do the following steps
- Navigate to your Profile by clicking on your name in the upper right corner and choosing “Profile”.
- On the Profile page, click the “Integrations” tab.
- In the “Clarity Integration” section, if you have authenticated with Clarity, you will see the Remove integration button, Clarity Settings and Clarity Scheduler options. Note:If Connect to Clarity button shows, this means you have NOT authenticated with Clarity. Please review this article to authenticate with Clarity.
- Click “Clarity Scheduler” to initiate the configuration process.
- The first page will require you to authenticate similar to when you first authenticated with Clarity. This creates the session necessary for working within you calendar settings. For this document, we will be assuming the Microsoft authentication is used and the guide will only focus on this experience. Click “Continue with Microsoft”
You may be asked to authenticate with a username/password, get logged right in, or go through a 2 factor authentication process (such as using a separate authenticator app) and this experience is dependent on your IT organization. Any issues authenticating may require your IT to assist as opposed to a Matrix support representative.
To Build Your First Schedule
Once authenticated with the scheduler, it’s time to build your first schedule. You should see a page that looks similar to this if it is your first time. Please follow the below steps:
1. Click on “Create new”.
2. Click “1:1” under the event types.
The following page will display. We have filled out a general view that you might use for a 30 minute meeting template. Remember what you are creating is the ability for external users to schedule time with you.
On Scheduler Editor page, please fill out the below information:
1. Event Title – It is recommended that you give this a descriptive title so that you know what you may want to edit in the future. This is not something external users will see – it’s for you. Here we have “30 Minute Meetings Mon – Fri” to denote this is a 30 minute meeting that can happen Monday through Friday as a general rule.
2. Event Duration – This is up to you but 30 minute meetings are usually standard. You pick the duration that you want to offer to external users.
3. Event Meeting or Location – This may be empty of display as “none” or if you have a meeting tool such as Microsoft Teams you may see it populate the dropdown. It’s how you wish to have the meeting by default. You can always edit your meetings after they are created as well.
4. Calendar Booking – Pick the calendar that will house your meetings. By default “Calendar” is likely selected and represents the main calendar used by Outlook.
5. Click Create in the lower right to begin filling out more details.
Once created you will come to a page that looks like below. For the remainder of this document, we will only go over the most important and most commonly used settings in order to allow external users the ability to create meetings on your calendar.
On the Availability Tab, we will want to define the days of the week and hours of the day that we will offer our calendar’s free time for scheduling.
By default, Monday – Friday will be selected and 9:00am – 5:00pm will be set. It is highly recommended that you modify each day and even break the day up if you have regular periods where you are not available (such as lunch breaks, team standups, or time set aside for yourself to do administrative work). In this example you can see Monday and Tuesday are broken up into Morning and Afternoon slots by hitting the “+” button next to each day. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday have a single time slot available but modified to only be available in the afternoon.
Be sure to click Save changes in the lower right once you’re done modifying your days and times.
On the Booking Options tab, you will want to set some buffer time between events and event limits. This will help to ensure a customer doesn’t book something too soon to the current time, too close to another meeting, or too far out into the future that you haven’t had time to schedule something yourself.
1. Before the event – set how many minute you need open before an event to start. The scheduler will not book in the buffer times.
2. After the event – set how many minutes you need open after an event ends. The scheduler will not book in the buffer times.
3. Minimum booking notice – how much time must pass in the future before someone can book a new meeting with you. (ex: if it’s 2:51pm right now someone cannot book a 3:00pm meeting, they would need to wait until approximately 4:00pm to book something new today).
4. Limit future bookings – how far out into the future do you want to show your availability
5. Minimum cancellation notice – the amount of time before a meeting starts that the scheduler can cancel it.
On the Communications Tab we will custom tailor the experience for you and your company with logos and templated messaging.
1. Company logo URL – this is a publicly accessible image online that you can link directly to and will be used when customers go through this booking experience.
2. Email Message
a. Custom Email Title – this is the subject you want to see for the email confirmation that a meeting has been booked with you.
b. Additional Info – This is any additional messaging you feel is needed for the customer to know about when booking time with you. Remember you do not need to put information like Microsoft Teams in here if you previously set this up to be used.
Again, do not forget to Save changes once these are set.
When you’re done you can hit Cancel button to go back to the landing page. All that is left to do now is to get the URL and create the link in your email signature!
1. From the “…” menu click the “Copy link” option. This will copy the unique URL to your clipboard.
Note: Before clicking the “Copy link” option, you may want to click "Preview" option to see how your scheduling experience will look. This will display things like the available times and days, naming conventions, and overall user experience someone may have in booking time with you.
2. In Outlook, edit your signature and include a new link with the pasted URL as the address. Now whenever anyone receives your email they will also see a link to schedule time with you! When the recipient clicks on the URL, they will see a page that looks like below
Feel free to explore the other settings we did not go over in this quick start guide by clicking the Edit button and previewing those changes from any page that you make the changes to. At the bottom of each page, there is a Preview button next to the Cancel buttton.
