Hi everyone, my name is Kevin. Today I want to show you how you can both get and use Microsoft
Bookings. And as full disclosure before we jump into this, I work at Microsoft as a full-time
employee. First off, what is Microsoft Bookings? Well, Microsoft Bookings allows customers
to schedule time or appointments with small businesses. So, imagine that maybe you're
a dentist, you're a piano teacher, you're a hairdresser, maybe you're a gym trainer. In
all of those cases, you have customers who want to schedule time with you. So Bookings sets up a page
where a customer can come in, they could choose a service that they want, they could choose the time
when they want the service, and then Bookings will go ahead and schedule that appointment
on behalf of the customer. And not only will it book the appointment, but then it'll also remind
the customer as the appointment gets closer via email and via text. And it's not just limited to
small businesses either. You could even imagine a teacher taking advantage of this. Maybe you have
office hours and you want your students to come in and book a time during your office hours,
or maybe you're an office worker, and rather than you sending out a meeting invitation to others,
you want your coworkers to come in and schedule time with you.
So there are lots of different people who Bookings can really help with scheduling. All right, well,
why don't we jump on the PC, and first off, I'll show you how you can get Microsoft Bookings.
Here I am on my PC, and first off, I want to show you how you can get Microsoft Bookings. And
to do that, I'm going to navigate to the website office.com, and I am going to click on Get Office.
Once we click on Get Office, it's going to show a variety of plans for home users. Now, one thing
to call out, Microsoft Bookings is not available to home users. So if you have a family, personal,
or home and student account, you won't be able to take advantage of Microsoft Bookings. You need to
be on a business account. So I'm going to go ahead and click on For Business up here, and this will
show me a variety of different business accounts. Microsoft Bookings comes with Microsoft 365
Business Standard and it also comes with Business Premium. So if you have one of these accounts,
you can take advantage of Microsoft Bookings. If you don't have it yet,
you could buy it. The cheapest plan that comes with it is $12.50 per month.
Now, $12.50 per month, you get Microsoft Bookings, but not only that, you also get all
of the different Office apps, including Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Access.
And then you also get Exchange for email, you get OneDrive for cloud storage, you get SharePoint,
and you also get Microsoft Teams. Now, compared to many other offerings that also offer appointment
booking, it's actually a relatively reasonable deal because you are getting quite a bit of
value. Many other offerings cost more than this, and all you're getting is appointment scheduling.
So all in all, it's a pretty good deal. Now, you need either one of these, and once you either
sign up for an account or if you already have an account, what we're going to do next is I'm going
to open up a browser window, and assuming you now have an account, we want to log into Microsoft
Bookings so we can get our business set up and start accepting appointments. Now, to do that,
here I am on the Microsoft Bookings website, but what I want to do is I want to log in, and the
easiest way to log in is to go up to the URL field and type in book.ms. MS stands for Microsoft. So
if you type in book.ms, this will drop you into Microsoft Bookings. And here we are on
the homepage. One of the things that you'll notice here at the top of the homepage, well, first off,
it's saying good evening, Kevin Stratvert. It's very nice of Bookings to say that to me.
And here it calls out new features and product tips. So I see all these different product tips,
and if I click on the carousel, I'll see a lot more tips. And what this is trying to do is it's
trying to help me get started with Bookings and make sure that my account is up and running. If
I look over on the left-hand side, probably one of the things I want to do is it says add logo,
and I don't yet have a logo for my business, and I don't even really know what type of business I
have. So maybe for the purposes of this tutorial, I'm going to pretend to be a tech support company,
and people will be able to book time with me for tech support, and maybe I'll have a few employees
as well. So first off, let me go ahead and add a logo. It's asking me to upload a new logo. Sure,
I can do that. And I have this profile picture on my desktop that I'm going to use as my logo.
Who is that handsome man? That is your very own Kevin Stratvert here, and I'm going to make that
my logo. There's nothing more narcissistic than having your own face as your logo,
and I'm going to go ahead and save that now. So, I've got my logo set up. One thing I also see on
here is I have the analytics, a very high-level analytics of how many bookings I've made,
estimated revenue from all of those bookings, and then also how many customers have booked. Now,
you see a lot of zeros here. In general, that's pretty bad for a business to have all these zeros.
Unless you're a business that loses money, in which case getting to zero is an accomplishment.
But in this case, that is not good. So why don't we go ahead and let's get things set up.
And to get things set up, the first thing I want to do is over here on the left-hand side,
I'm going to start from the bottom and work my way up. We're going to just start with
business information first. So I'm going to click on business information. So right now,
my business name is just Kevin Stratvert. I think I could do better than that. So maybe I'm going to
just say Kevin Stratvert, and maybe we'll go with Quality Tech Support. I think that sounds like a
pretty good name. And then business address. You could enter in an address here. You could enter in
your business phone number. You could enter in an email address where customer replies go to,
your website URL, privacy policy URL, any terms and service or terms and conditions you might
have. Business type, well, I'm an information technology company. And then the currency
that you deal with. And once again, I've already loaded my logo. Unfortunately, it takes a little
bit of time for that to propagate through. So it doesn't immediately show. That could definitely be
improved there. Now up here with the business hours, I have the hours set to eight to five,
and that seems like a pretty good working day. So, I'm going to leave the hours as they are. And I've
entered all my business information. And so what I want to do next is over on the left-hand side,
I said that we're going to work our way up. Next, I want to click on services. And so I'm going to
save my changes that I made here. I also could have clicked on the save button up here. So, I'm
going to go ahead, let's click on save. It's nice that it reminded me to save that. Now in services,
I have one service added here. What you could do is once you add a service, simply click into
that and it'll let you edit the service. Now I haven't really configured this yet. So I'm
going to run through this and we'll walk through what type of features and different options you
could set for your services. And so, my service is tech consulting. And what I want to do is to
help customers out, I want to enter a little bit of a description so they understand what tech
consulting encompasses. And so, I'm going to say get help with your computer issues. Worst comes to
worst, we'll simply reboot and reinstall to see if that fixes the problem. You know, it's funny
with computers, sometimes rebooting is one of the best things you could do. Gets rid of all those
phantom processes that are still running and just gets you into a clean state.
All right, then default location. You could set a location for this service. In this case, I'm going
to leave it as is. Because it is tech consulting, you have the option to add an online meeting.
And what it'll do is it'll add a Teams link within the meeting and so you can then
interface with the customer online. That sounds pretty cool, so I'm going to do that.
Now I could set up the default duration for this service. You have all different
options. You could set a certain number of days, hours, and minutes. Now I don't think
I want to offer tech consulting that goes over a day, so I'm going to leave it at zero there.
But maybe I'm going to set it to at least an hour, so that's the minimum for my consulting services.
Another interesting thing that was recently added is you can add buffer time
on your calendar that customers can't book. So let's say, for example, I do a one-hour session
and maybe afterwards I need some time to cool down because tech consulting can be pretty tiring. And
so maybe I'll set a five or 10-minute break afterwards. But in this case, I want to try to
make as much money as possible with my business. So if I have back-to-back tech consulting
sessions, I'm going to go with it. You can set that here. I'm going to turn off the buffer time.
One of the things you can also set here is enable customers to manage their appointment when it
was booked by you or your staff on their behalf. That sounds good. So if I schedule a meeting for
someone, the customer can then come in and they can go ahead and adjust the time or reschedule.
That seems like a good business practice just to give customers flexibility there.
And I could also set my default price here. And you have lots of different options here
all the way from a fixed price to starting at, to hourly, to call us. So, you could set lots
of different prices. Now I'm going to set a fixed price for my hour session. And I'm going to get
up to lawyer-level pricing. And I'm going to go with $600 here for an hour. I know that's very
expensive, but let's see if anyone bites. And I could also add notes or internal notes here.
What this'll do is with internal notes, this is something that my staff members
can see for this service. In this case, I don't have anything to add, so I'll leave this blank.
Now here you have something called custom fields. And I'm going to click on this. What's interesting
is when a customer books this service, this is the information that Bookings asks the customer
to provide. In this case, I'm requiring a customer email. And maybe I could also go in and say, hey,
you have to provide a phone number, an address, a note. And what I could do is if I go up here
to the top bar, I could add additional questions, whether it's a text question, a dropdown question.
So if I want different fields that the customer has to provide beyond what's listed here, I could
go ahead and do that. But in this case, I'm happy if the customer just provides an email address.
Now one of the things that you could do here is you can send email reminders. So once a customer
books a session with you, you could set up different reminders. So here I'm going to go
ahead and click on edit. And it says that one day before, send a reminder to the customer,
and then here's the text that it'll send. So it says just a quick reminder that your service is
coming up soon. I could indicate how far ahead of the appointment I want the reminder to go out at.
I could say whether it goes to the customer or the staff member or simply all attendees.
And then I could modify the message. And so one thing you could even do,
I'm going to go ahead and let's discard that. But what I can do is I could even add multiple
reminders. So maybe a week before and then a day before, I could send out different reminders.
And then here too, I also have the option to include additional information that goes out. And
I have all sorts of formatting controls as part of that. So very nice way where reminders will
go out to your customers or to your students or to your coworkers, whoever's booking the appointment,
it'll remind them that they have an appointment coming up. And the goal of this is that hopefully
it reduces no shows and the customers who sign up end up showing up. You know, the worst thing for a
business is that you had an hour scheduled, the customer doesn't show up, that's now time lost,
and you've lost that revenue for that hour. Now one of the things that Bookings also does here,
which is very nice, is not only does it send out email reminders, there's also the option to send
text message notifications to your customer. So if you require a phone number, it'll send
out a text message as a reminder. And one thing that Bookings calls out is that this is a preview
feature and at some point they may charge for it, but it's currently still free or at least included
with your Bookings plan. The next option here is publishing options and we can show this service on
the booking page. There's an overall booking page that lists all of your services and I would like
to include this service as part of that, but maybe you have a service that you no longer want to show
or maybe you only send it to select customers and you don't want everyone to have access to it.
You can uncheck this in that case, but I want all of my services to be shown on the main booking
page, so I'm going to leave that checked. And down here you have different scheduling policies
that you can set. Now I'm just going to use the default scheduling policy and I'll get to that
when we get to the booking page, but one thing to call out is that as you're setting up services,
what you can do is you can modify the booking policies for each one of the services if you want
to customize it by service. So let's say in the example that you're a dentist, maybe if someone
is just coming for a cleaning, you know, you need lead time of just a day, but maybe if someone's
coming in and you're going to fix cavities, then maybe you need more lead time because maybe
there's some prep involved. So different services might require different lead time and different
minimum lead time and time increments. So you can go ahead and modify this on the service level.
And similarly, what you can do is you can also modify email notifications on a service level,
and then you could also modify whether customers can choose a specific person for booking. But
all of these are grayed out right now because I'm going to just use my default scheduling policy and
I'll show you how we could set that once we get there. All of this looks good. And once I'm done,
I'm going to click on save up here on top. And so, I now have my tech consulting service all
ready to go. It's a little pricey, but I don't know. Let's try it out and see what happens.
The next thing is I mentioned before that we're moving our way up. I want to click on staff next.
And currently I'm the only staff member in this organization. That means that I have to field all
the requests for tech support. I don't like that. I need some people to help me out. So I'm going
to click on add a staff member and we are going to hire Adele Vance. She sent me her resume and
she looks like a very promising candidate. So I'll bring her on board and add her as a staff member
right away. Now, what we could do is here for Adele Vance, I could set her initials.
I could go ahead and set a theme color for her. Adele seems kind of like a green bright person. So
let me go ahead and set green bright. And what I'm going to do here is I could set an email address,
a phone number for Adele. So let me go ahead and set an email address for Adele. I'm just going to
go ahead and type in AdeleVance@Microsoft.com. Adele is set as a guest. There are different
permissions that you could set. You could have the administrator, which allows you to modify
all of the settings throughout Microsoft Bookings. You also have a viewer and a viewer is able to
come in and they can modify the, they could view the calendar. With a guest, that's the most
limited permissions, but all they can do is they could be assigned to a booking, but they can't
actually view the booking mailbox. So, it's the most limited permissions. And I'm going to set
that to Adele because I mentioned she just came on board. I don't know her too well, so I don't
know if I trust her that much yet. And here it says notify the staff via email when a booking is
assigned to them. So if a customer comes in and picks them as the staff member they would like,
Adele will get an email letting her know. That looks great. And then for the business hours,
what I want to do is I want to use the standard business hours here. So,
I'm going to go ahead and set that. One more option up above is events on office calendar
affect availability. What that means is if you're using Outlook as your personal calendar,
that'll affect your availability within Microsoft Bookings. So like I said, if you're using Outlook
and maybe you have a full day of meetings on Monday, well within Bookings, no one will be
able to book time with you on Monday because that time is taken. So it's kind of, it's very nice how
Microsoft Bookings integrates with your Outlook calendar and it has awareness of what else is
going on. So very, very nice functionality. So, we've got Adele as a staff member here. Let's
go ahead and save her as a new staff member. So now not only am I fielding tech support,
but we also have Adele on board and hopefully she picks up a lot of the heavy load because
here I am running this company. I'd like my staff to do most of the work.
Okay, the next thing that we're going to do is I'm going to jump over customers for now and
we'll come back to this. But first I want to go to the booking page. And now with the booking page,
this is where customers will go to book the service with you. So, let's run through this
and see what some of the different options are. The first one is require a Microsoft 365 or Office
365 account for my organization to book. What this means is maybe you're an office worker and
you have office hours, and you only want people in your organization to book time with you, you
can check this box. But if you're say a dentist or you're a gym trainer or a piano teacher and
you have external customers booking time with you, you do not want to check this because they might
have any email address. They might have a Gmail, a Yahoo, an AOL. So any type of email address,
you don't want to check this. Now with this next one, disable direct search engine indexing.
If you have a business like a hair salon or something like that, you want search
engines to index you because people can find your service and then people could book time with you.
But once again, maybe you're a teacher, maybe you're an office worker and you don't want search
engines to pick it up, in which case you can go ahead and disable that. But in this case, I want
people to find my page so I'm not going to disable it. Now they have a customer data usage consent.
As a customer fills out your booking form, they're providing their name, their email address,
their phone number. So, it's personal data and you can include different information here about
your collection policies if you'd like. Now here's where we can set the default scheduling
policies. I mentioned earlier on the services that you can modify it on a service level,
but here I just want to set my scheduling policy all up and all my services will use this. And so,
time increments. So this is the time increments that a customer could book in so they could book
in 30 minute increments. That means that someone could book at 9, 9:30, 10, 10:30. So, I think that
sounds good. I'll set it on 30 minute increments. And then the minimum lead time for bookings, it's
set to 24 hours. That means I get a day's notice of an appointment coming up. That sounds pretty
good. I'd like to have at least a heads up. So if no one books, maybe I take the day off and it'd be
nice to know ahead of time versus a meeting coming in at the last minute. And the maximum lead time,
I'm going to set it so the maximum time someone could set out is a year. I don't
think it makes sense for someone to set out in a tech support thing for two years out. Otherwise,
they could probably solve the problem on their own. Within email notifications, notify the
business via email when a booking is created. So, if a customer comes in and sets up an appointment,
it'll send me a notification. That's very nice to have. So I'm going to leave that checked. And send
a meeting invite to the customer. This one is interesting. Not only will it tell the customer
that they have an appointment, it's confirmed, but you could also send a meeting invite. So,
in Outlook, you could get a meeting invitation. In Gmail, you can get a meeting invitation
and it'll add it to the calendar. I personally really like this. So, I'm going to check that box.
I like when businesses send me an appointment because then on my phone, I could just add it
to my calendar. It's nice functionality. So I'm going to check that, but your call and
whether you want to use something like that. And then you also have down here, the staff,
allow customers to choose a specific person for the booking. I added Adele as a staff member and
maybe my customers really like Adele and they want to pick her. Why not? I'll let people do that. So,
I'm going to check that box as well. Down here at the very bottom now, there's an option for general
availability. And right now it's set to bookable when staff are free. So as long as either Adele or
I have some availability, customers will be able to book. Now you also have not bookable and custom
hours. And it's more interesting down here, if I click on this set different availability
for a date range. So here I might want to say, hey, not bookable for, you know, maybe July 4th,
because we're going to take that week off. So you could go ahead and set time that people can't
book. And then you could even set custom hours as well for when people could book during a certain
time period. Let's say if maybe it's leading up to Christmas and you have shortened hours,
you could go ahead and set those shortened hours. I don't need to do that. So I'm going to go ahead
and just simply delete that. But you do have a lot of flexibility here in terms of what the
availability is. I'm going to scroll up and work my way down the right hand side. So, this is my
page right now. Let me go with a lighter blue, just to make it a little more cheery. You know,
people always look forward to tech support. So whatever I could do to lift their spirits.
Along with these default color themes, I could also set a custom color scheme for my booking
page. And what you could do is you could set two colors, a highlight color and a header color
by defining the number value for the color. But I like the pre-selected one. So, I'm simply going
to go with that. I could also display my business logo on my booking page. If you remember, I set my
profile picture as my business logo. And of course, I want to show that on my booking page.
So, I will leave this checked. Down here with the time zone, what you could do is you could
set the time zone settings and you could show it in the business time zone or the local users time
zone to be user-friendly. Maybe I have people calling in from other time zones. I want the
times to match their time zone, but when I get the appointment, it'll align with my time zone.
And then lastly, what you can also do is you could use Twilio. Twilio is an SMS notification service.
But if you use Twilio, you can set this up and it'll send SMSs or text messages
to remind customers of appointments. Okay, well, I filled out all of these details on the booking
page. So the next thing that I need to do is if I go to the top of the page to publish my page,
I need to click on save and publish. Let's click on that. And yes, my page is now live.
If I click on open publish page, I can see what this looks like. So, let's take a
look. Look at that. Here's the handsome guy that you're scheduling tech support with.
And what I could see here is I have Kevin Stratvert, quality tech support, tech consulting,
one hour. That's the service that I offer. And that's the service that's selected because that's
the only service I added. It's a little pricey, but to get to talk to Kevin might be a good deal.
And here I could see the days of the week that I could choose. So I could choose different days
of the week. And then I see the hours that are available. And in fact, what I could do here is I
could select different staff. So, if I just select Kevin, I'll see that on Monday, Kevin's a little
busier. He's only available at eight and 8.30. So not as much time. But if I click on Adele,
she has a lot more availability. So maybe I'll schedule some time. Well, let's go with Kevin.
I mean, if I'm going to pay $600, I might as well get him. And I could go with 8 a.m. here. So this,
once again, this is the experience that your customer will see as they're going through and
scheduling or booking an appointment with you. They could also see the times if they want to,
if a customer wants to modify the time zone, they could click there, choose a different time zone.
And then this is where the customer adds their details. So let's say that Emily Braun wants
to add an appointment with me. And her email address is kevstrat2@outlook.com. So she's
going to enter in her email address and she can enter a phone number and address and any notes.
Now, Emily entered a note here saying this better be good considering how much money I'm paying you.
Yeah, fair enough. It's a lot of money. Hopefully I could solve her tech problems. And now Emily
is going to go ahead and she's going to book this meeting or book this appointment with my business.
Emily sees a confirmation message saying thank you for booking with us. You will get a confirmation
message and email shortly and then she could click on okay. Now, the next thing that Emily sees is
it's a confirmation page with her appointment, who it's with, and she also sees the price
again. And so what Emily could do is she could reschedule if actually she wants a different time.
She could cancel the booking if maybe she realizes that she's paying a lot of money
for something she could probably just use Bing or Google to solve. Or she could set up another
appointment if she really wants to talk to me and she finds my sessions really compelling. Now that
Emily is booked time, let's jump into Emily's email. And what I can see now is here it's sent
through a meeting invitation or a calendar invite. Remember when I went through the settings, I said
send a calendar invite. Well, Emily received a calendar invite and if she clicks yes now,
what this does is I'm going to click over onto my calendar and we're going to go over to Monday
coming up next week. And what we could see now is the tech consulting shows up on her calendar. So,
I really like doing that, it's a nice thing. But your customer will get an additional message by
email. And here if I click on the latest one, I'll see the confirmation email. So, it says confirmed
booking for Emily. It has the details once again. And I included a Teams link in there so I could
join the Teams meeting. And I could also click here to manage my booking. And if Emily clicks on
manage booking, that'll take her back to this page where she could reschedule, cancel or book a new
meeting. So pretty nice and streamlined experience for Emily. I'm going to go back to the main
bookings experience. So this is for my business now and on the booking page, some of the other
things that I could do is I could also embed my booking link on a website. So here I could just
simply copy the HTML code or I could even copy the iframe code and then I could insert this into
say a webpage or maybe in a Facebook message or a Facebook link for my business page or maybe I put
it on Twitter. So wherever I want to share that booking link, I could do that or maybe even in my
email, let's say my email signature, I can include the link there. Just tell people, hey, by the way,
if you want to book time with me, feel free to do that. Earlier, we skipped over the customers
option here. So, let's go back to customers. And the reason I did that is, well, I wanted to add a
customer first. So here you see anyone who fills out my booking page automatically gets added to
my customer list. And if I click on Emily, I can then go ahead and let's click on edit. I can edit
the customer details if I'd like. I can add all sorts of information like the name, the email,
the phone, IM, all types of information. I'm not going to make any changes, I'll just cancel.
What I can also do, I could add new customers here. If I click on new customers, I could add
someone or I could even import customers. Let's say you run an established business
and you simply want to pull in existing customers. You could upload a CSV file to make it very quick
and easy to get customers into Microsoft Bookings. But once again, I had a booking page that someone
could just sign up on. So I had Emily go ahead and enter her information so I didn't have to do that.
The next thing I'm going to click on is calendar over on the left hand side,
and I have it currently set to the month view. And here I see that there is an appointment now coming
up on Monday for tech consulting. So, I'm going to click on Monday and I can even jump to a day view.
And here I'll see with the day view, I have both Adele and I also have me. I currently have a tech
consulting session set up with Emily. Adele currently has nothing going on and then I see
all the other times on my Outlook calendar that are busy, they show up here. So I have a pretty
busy Monday coming up. I could also switch to the work week view and see all the upcoming
appointments. So, lots of different views that I can set and I could also go to the month view.
Now on the calendar view, some of the other things you can do is let's imagine that, you know, maybe
you're a hair salon or you're a gym trainer and you're meeting with your customer and they simply
ask you, hey, can you set up an appointment for me right now? On the calendar view, what you can do
is click on new booking, go down to the service. The only service I have is tech consulting, but if
you had more services, you could select from all your different services. And I'm going to click on
tech consulting and then here I could simply set up an appointment. So, I could type in the name,
the customer email. I have some of the settings of send an email confirmation, but since the customer
is doing it in person, maybe I don't have to do that. I could set to let the customer manage their
booking and here I have all the details I could set the times. I could also add a buffer time. So,
all the same types of things that I could do earlier, I could do that here as well. So this way
I'm going to discard this, but I could go ahead and simply book something on behalf of a customer.
Now, another interesting thing here too is I can set my time off. So if I click on time off,
I might want to say, hey, I'm not available at all between these dates. And then that way,
if a customer tries to book time, it'll show that I'm unavailable or maybe Adele, my employee
wants to take some time off. I could set that on here and she won't be an available staff member.
All right, well, that wraps up this overview of Microsoft Bookings.
If you're a small business owner or a teacher or an office worker, and you think you can now
have your customers, your coworkers or your students, go ahead and book time with you,
please give this video a thumbs up. If you want to see future videos like this,
hit that subscribe button. That way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes
out. And lastly, if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future, leave a comment down
below. I read them all and I'll add it to my list of videos to create. All right, well, that's all
I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed, and I also hope to see you next time. Bye.