Offerings allow new or established clients to schedule themselves for an appointment with a member of your team.  Usually a given Offering entails scheduling with a specific coach, BUT what if you’ve got a collection of coaches, and the “who to book with” part of the equation is really a matter of whomever is available at the desired time?

For example, say Alice is available on Mondays and Bob is available on Tuesdays: what we’d really like is for our clients to be able to pick whichever time works for them on Mondays OR Tuesdays.

In another example, a certain school of business growth encourages teams to utilize a “round robin” strategy for assigning initial coaching calls for prospective clients. This allows all enrollment coaches (or, in other words, sales folks) to have a balanced volume of conversions.

To address these scenarios and others, you can now configure your Offerings to have multiple coaches be considered for scheduling purposes.  Let’s see how this works!

Multi-Coach Scheduling for Offerings

Setting this up is a matter of configuring the Appointment component of your Offering.

When configuring this, you usually just pick a coach / Appointment Type combination, and the system does the rest.

By clicking the “Allow other coaches for availability” checkbox you can choose other coaches who should be considered as available for this Offering Appointment.

When you indicate other coaches, the appointment time options that your clients are presented with will be the union of availability options from each of the coaches you’ve indicated.

This may LOOK like a lot to setup, but the bulk is to do with how CA should choose which coach when a multitude are available!

Check out the note indicated with a star: when you choose to let other coaches be considered for scheduling based on their availability, it MIGHT be the case that those coaches ALSO have an Appointment Type of the same name.  When they do, that coach’s Appointment Type (of the same name) dictates settings that are pertinent to that coach, such as weekly availability, padding, cancellation rules.  Each coach can set those preferences in Settings >> Appointment Config >> Appointment Types.

Once you’ve chosen your coaches, you’ve got a number of settings to govern WHICH coach should be scheduled when more than one happen to be free for a chosen time.

You can opt to default to the main coach indicated in the “With whom and which type?” option, a good choice if you’ve got a head coach or perhaps the others are still in training.  The “Prefer whomever has fewer appointments…” rules work nicely to spread out appointments over a day/week/month to avoid overwhelm and schedule saturation.

These rules are applied one by one, in order, until a clear winner is revealed.  As you can see, if it’s completely a tie per each of the rules you pick, the system will choose randomly from the remaining candidates.

Beyond those rules, you can set your preferences for defining more precisely what “fewer appointments” means.

Factoring in duration is often a preferable way to determine what’s considered a full schedule.  For example, if Jaclyn has four 15-minute appointments scheduled, and Morgan has three 60-minute appointments scheduled for the same day, we’d consider Morgan busier (3 hours versus 1) and thus we’d want Jaclyn to be the one to receive a new client appointment.

Finally, note the “Booking caption” setting towards the top:

Generally [coachName] is a nice magic tag to use, but because it could be someone other than the coach indicated in the “With whom and which type?” option just above, you’ll want to replace that with something more generic when it could be one of several coaches. “Our Team” or your company name might be good choices. We’ve replaced it with “CoachAccountable Support” in this example.

Additional Considerations for Multi-Coach Scheduling

Continue down to the Welcome Message tab, and you’ll see [coachFirstName] as an available tag. That will automatically fill in the name of the coach with whom the appointment has been scheduled.

You’ll see the same in the Confirmation Email, which will show as if sent by that scheduled-with coach. The coach will also receive an email with the appointment’s details, and as usual will see the appointment show up in any synced calendars. Visit the Team Dashboard to see all scheduled appointments account-wide.

And that’s all there is to it!

Wanna see a live example of this in action?  Visit the Offering we use to let our customers schedule with our support team!

Use this new round-robin setup to expand your availability with a single Offering link, allowing coaches with different time zones or working hours to share. Here’s to helping grow your coaching business with expanded features from CoachAccountable!

Have you been hanging on to another scheduling system in order to maintain round-robin appointment distribution? See how much more it can be as set up with CoachAccountable – start your free 30-day trial today.