The CoachAccountable Blog

It’s a real simple theme with today’s new version of CoachAccountable: the addition of TWO new integrations, MS Teams and Google Meet.

These virtual meeting platforms join the ranks of (long-supported) Zoom, enabling CA to now create virtual meeting rooms for your Appointments within these two in the exact same fashion.

The setup for all of this lives in the new Settings >> Appointment Config >> Virtual Meetings area:

You can go down the line, connecting (or not!) like 1-2-3.

Here you can connect any or all of the now-supported virtual meeting providers: Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet.

Connecting works like connecting the respective calendars: a quick bounce over to either the Microsoft or Google side of things (to be told CA wishes to have permission to create these meetings on your behalf), and you clicking to grant as much.  Takes less than 60 seconds, closer to 5 if you’re already logged in and a quick reader.

(Important caveat: the MS Teams API is ONLY supported for Work and Business accounts with Microsoft.  If you have a Personal account, neither CoachAccountable nor any other app is allowed to create MS Teams meetings for you.)

Once connected, you’ll find suitable options for each of your Appointment Types in the Preferences tab:

You can also set these preferences for a given Appointment Type when editing that type.

When scheduling an Appointment of a type that supports several choices, you (and your clients!) will be given the option to choose the preferred one:

Same deal when clients schedule as part of an Offering, too!

Like with Zoom meetings, the join link for MS Teams meetings and Google Meets display in-app with Appointments, automatically when it’s upcoming and soon to be relevant, or with a click of the calendar icon when looking further ahead:

Sharing Connections

This one goes out to all the CA power users in the house, namely those who maintain multiple accounts for operating in different contexts.  I see you!

There’s… let’s charitably call it a “quirky” thing about connections between one app and another (such as connecting Zoom to a CoachAccountable account): Zoom (and some, but not all others) will go out of its way to prevent multiple connections to the same app.  Namely if you connect to a second account, Zoom will immediately and deliberately sever/invalidate the first connection.  This is well-documented for Zoom, but this is not unique to Zoom nor to CoachAccountable.

To get around any such issue for all three providers, there’s now a way for the owner of a given connection to share that single connection with others (including him- or herself in a separate account).

To do this, click the “Connection sharing…” button for a given connected provider and you’ll see the following:

Click that copy button and you’re on your way!

The share token is the key: with it, another user (or yourself in another account) will be able to add and use that connection too.

And for you as the owner, if the share token ever falls into the wrong hands, you can click the “Change this share token…” link to rotate it to something else.  You will also see a list of any users with whom your connection is presently shared, with controls to rescind that sharing whenever desired.

And that’s all there is to it!  Connect your providers, choose which Appointment Types should have which types of meetings, and schedule as usual.  CA does the rest by setting them up, and making it super easy for both you and your clients to find the join link in notifications, reminders, synced calendar events, and in-app displays.

Usually I’d pack more into a .point release, but with this pair of integrations being far and away the most consistently requested integrations, I’m delighted to honor these requests sooner rather than later.

Enjoy!

I remember cooking up the functionality for coaches to schedule a regular series of Appointments long ago.  It was in CA’s first year of the (commercially viable) 2.0 release.  I was in Bali at the time.

Lotta flexibility here for scheduling a regular series.  Reads like a nice sentence, marching orders to be carried out for you!

I thought for a beat about adding this to the client side of things, but I thought “Nah”.  There are a whole lot more constraints that clients are subject to when picking from specific date and time options and lookout windows, and back in those days I had LOTS of things to focus on to evolve the relatively nascent platform.  It was well enough to keep that scheduling one at a time!

And of course these days the rules for client scheduling come with more constraints, thanks to the allocations and duration rules provided by CA Engagements.  Great power for coaches to control and regulate how and when they can be scheduled with, but again, all the more at odds with letting a client willy-nilly choose to take the next 8 Tuesdays at 10:00am: there could be a dental appointment somewhere in there to break the streak!

So I figured the UI of having someone choose yet potentially often have some reason why the whole series is not be on offer made that feature perhaps more gnarly and unwieldy to use than it was worth.

Then we got this email to support yesterday from Kirsten Chong of Building Champions, emphasis added:

Hello,

I wanted to reach out and ask if you thought the ability for clients to schedule recurring sessions would ever be an option in CA?

The reason I’m asking is because we are getting this question more and more often from our clients and so I thought I would check.

I know internally we can do this and override blocked time, from the client’s side it would be great if they are told of the conflicts, and book everything BUT those dates.

Just an idea

Thanks!

Huh.

That’s elegant.

Yes.

It could give a little alert as needed, letting ’em know if there are some that are a no go, and in so many words just ask “You want the other ones?”

Why didn’t I think of that?

So today I spent about 3 hours and cooked up that functionality, deployed all tested and ready to go with 25 minutes to spare before my 11:00am.

I even made a nice little pop up that pops up if and whenever needed, letting the client choose what to do:

Can’t get the whole series? Then you get the full story of what’s so, and the power to choose.

I wrote back:

Ah, that’s a fine idea! I originally decided against adding the ability for clients to schedule series because of the possible conflicts and the difficulty it might be with the back and forth for a user who can’t override, e.g. if you want a series of 8 but only 6 are available, it gets tricky.

But you’re right, giving them the option to book what IS available in case there are any conflicts is an elegant way to manage this, balancing both the power and ability to manage when that power falls short.

This is now in place! Clients will now see the option to schedule series just like coaches do.

Enjoy!
John

I can’t deny, I relished in the reply I got 19 minutes later:

This is AMAZING!!! You rock John. Seriously. Thank you!!!!!

Thank you, Kirsten!  That little bit of insight that made things come in to clear focus, and here’s to a slightly better CA for all!

Some folks (looking at you, enterprise buyers) get a little nervous about our size as a tiny team, but this to me is the delight of running things a bit unorthodox.  I would be having way less fun (and CA wouldn’t be nearly as good) if I had to coordinate across several teams with disparate priorities to make this sort of thing happen as a Tier-3 Priority™ for next quarter’s Roadmap Release Initiatives®, or whatever.

I’ll take my means and manner of delightful collaboration with customers any day. :)

CoachAccountable calendar sync now has a big leg up for those clients who just can’t be bothered to actually set any of it up.

For a long time now, it’s been the case that both coaches and their clients can sync their calendar of choice (be it Google, Outlook, or Apple) with CoachAccountable.  This enables CA to automatically add whatever appointments get scheduled to the calendar of choice and, in the case of coaches, read their availability for the sake of avoiding double booking.

This is great for both parties, and, on account of the whole double-booking-avoidance thing, is especially a win for coaches.

But sometimes clients can’t be bothered.  For some it’s an extra step that they just don’t (or won’t) get around to.  For others it might be concerns over security, sometimes based on corporate IT policy or the like, that make full-on calendar sync a non-starter.

As an alternative to full-on calendar sync, CA has long supported the ability to subscribe to ICS calendar feeds.  But that too puts the impetus on clients to actually set it up.

Enter calendar invites via email

As a solution to the hurdle of clients needing to actually do something for your coaching appointments to appear in their calendar, CA now provides for a robust (yet totally passive) approach.  Clients can now receive calendar invites by email for all appointments you schedule with them, meaning those appointments will be automatically added to their calendar as those email notifications are received.

Likewise, calendar invites can also describe (and affect) changes to previously scheduled appointments, namely rescheduling and canceling.

» Continue reading “Calendar Sync via Email Invites”

The standard approach for letting CA know when you’re open for clients to schedule with you works pretty well.  You define your “typical week” (for example, something like “Mondays from 9 to noon, Tuesdays and Thursdays 2 to 5pm”), sync with your calendar of choice (so CA knows to carve out those specific times when you’re otherwise busy), and you’re done!  That leaves you with a routine set of blocks in a typical week, minus whatever time you’ve got blocked off for vacations/the odd dental appointment/whatever else comes up.

It takes all of about 5 minutes to set up, and serves as a 90% solution year round.

But SOMETIMES temporary variations on this theme apply, wherein from week to week you might need to deviate from your typical availability.  Perhaps your schedule’s opened up a little, or you’re working remotely in a different timezone, or you just want to try out a new schedule to see how it works.

For this CoachAccountable now allows you to define alternate availability rules that temporarily override that of your typical week.

» Continue reading “Alternate Availability for Appointment Scheduling”

Engagements are CA’s way of allowing you to track a clients progression through an allocation of appointments (e.g. 10 hours or 12 sessions), with the option to add recurring invoicing and timely notifications along the way.

When we first launched Engagements, Engagement notifications only came in one flavor: coaches could schedule a notification based on progress through the Engagement allocation (e.g. “Hi Morgan, you have 3 appointments left. Here are the ones you’ve had so far…”).  Later on, and by request, we added the option for time-based notification (“Hi Morgan, you’re now 30 days into your Engagement…”).

Based on the feedback you’ve given us we’ve now added a third flavor of Engagement notification: Schedule Nudge.

A Schedule Nudge will notify you or your client when it’s been a certain number of days since the last appointment, specifically when there’s still nothing else scheduled on the calendar. Setting these serves to alert you (or your client) when things are ostensibly stalled out in your coaching relationship and prompt scheduling of the next session, and you can use this to keep the momentum in the coaching relationship going. The automated nature of these nudges means the system can now step in so you don’t have to.

Let’s take a look.

» Continue reading “Nudge Clients When They Haven’t Scheduled an Appointment”

With CoachAccountable Engagements, you can allow only certain clients to book appointments within a package, and with Offerings you can let prospective clients book an Appointment Type that established clients can’t see (and vice-versa).

Emma, Chief Organizational Officer at Action Edge Business Coaching, asked about yet another level of appointment access customization:

Is it possible to restrict which clients are able to book a certain appointment type?

For example, we do 15-30 minute check in calls with employees of some of our clients. We don’t want all our clients to be able to access that. Is there a way to specify who can see this within the appointment types?

Introducing client-specific appointment access settings!

This is perfect if you, like Action Edge, have different types of coaching clients, where only some clients should have access to a particular type of appointment. Another great fit is coaches who have different levels of access (i.e. higher-paying clients get longer sessions), different areas of coaching, or even different locations (perhaps in-person meetings can happen, but only for certain individuals nearby).

Let’s take a look.

» Continue reading “Customize Client Access to Appointment Types”

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!

» Continue reading “Scheduling With Your Coaches Based on Who’s Available”

And then there were three.

Around this time two years ago I added direct sync with your Google calendar.  That fit the bill and did the trick for the vast majority of CA users.

Then around this time last year I added direct sync with your Outlook calendar.  That did the trick for most of the remaining CA users.

Now it seems there’s just remaining a rather small sliver of the CA community that uses neither, and rather instead keeps their online calendar with Apple Calendar with their Apple iCloud account.  Today I’m happy to report CA has them well covered too¹: you can now directly sync your CoachAccountable appointments with your Apple Calendar.

Let’s see what’s new!

» Continue reading “Direct Sync with your Apple Calendar”

Zoom is a popular platform for conducting coaching sessions, and for good reason!  If you’re not meeting in person, it’s more or less the next best thing: face-to-face video calls that are easy to set up and easy to join, for you and your clients.

CoachAccountable now allows you to connect your Zoom account, which means the system can automatically set up Zoom Meetings for your appointments.

Here’s the gist in one minute:

Let’s see how it works! » Continue reading “Automatically Set Up Zoom Meetings for your Appointments”

About a year ago we released direct sync functionality with Google Calendar.  When we did I figured requests would start rolling in for a more direct sync with other calendar systems, but to my surprise (and kinda delight, I guess!) having just Google Calendar seemed to cover the needs of the vast majority of CA users, so I was content to leave it at that and focus on other projects.

But last month I got a nice bit of perspective in a conversation with Martin in Australia.  I may not have it word for word, but it was something to the effect of “There are two types of software out there: those that integrate fully with Microsoft products, and those we don’t use”.

What a succinct and compelling case for adding such support to CoachAccountable.

Two productive weeks later CoachAccountable now supports full synchronization with Outlook calendars.

» Continue reading “Direct Sync with your Outlook Calendar”