Exciting changes are coming to Vectera. Back in 2016, Vectera was conceived as a videomeeting solution. Over the years, more capabilities were added to the platform including the scheduling capability. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the platform users are scheduling their meetings with Vectera.
Allowing your end users to create appointments with our customers within Vectera itself significantly lowered barriers and created an immediate positive effect for those that chose to use it. Over time, the importance of the scheduling tool increased, and so did the feature set. Options were being added on top of the basic functionality at breakneck speed, until the tool itself became extremely powerful, but also a bit bulky to set up, especially for first-time users.
In the following months, our development will give some long overdue updates to the scheduling configuration experience. The end result will be a more intuitive and more powerful scheduling tool. It will be delivered in multiple phases, with the first noticeable releases already in Q2 2022.
The entire configuration interface will receive a fresh coat of paint (and significant restructuring behind the scenes), where some early design decisions are reverted to a more intuitive workflow. Based on numerous customer talks and data insights, we analysed what is really essential and what is hardly ever used. For instance, having seperate locations for each hosts in a group appointment type is hardly relevant for anyone. This process results in more confusion than benefits. By bringing some configuration parameters to a more global level, the overall overview and control is improved for group appointment types.
Apart from making the general scheduling setup a nice and streamlined process, two new major capabilities will be added: Touchpoints & availabilities: "Touchpoints" will allow you to keep the easily configure all post-booking communication: Primarily confirmations, calendar invites, reminders (incl SMS) will be a lot easier to manage. In addition, external API pushes will be added later as well. Think of slack updates when someone books or cancels an appointment or updates in your CRM.
Another significant newcomer will be the "Availabilities", which streamlines the way a user can set when they can be booked. Instead of each of your appointment types having its own custom weekly schedule, you will be able to create schedule(s) on your profile, which can then be assigned to an appointment type. This results in easy reuse of a commonly used setting. For group appointments, you’ll be able to see if there is sufficient coverage by getting a full view on the combined availability of the selected team members.
Our team is excited to see the new features become a reality, and we hope you do too!
Greetings
The Vectera Team