The CoachAccountable Blog

Here is a great example of where CoachAccountable’s coaching software gets better through me being exposed to a style of doing things other than my own.

The calendar feed of appointments is a lovely thing, allowing both coaches and clients to have appointments [set within CoachAccountable] appear right within their usual calendars (like Google Calendars, iCal, and Outlook).

Beyond the what and when, calendar software aficionados know that it’s handy to have location and descriptive information about a calendar event right there as well.

For my sake when it comes to coaching appointments there’s nothing to it: “where” is invariably on the phone, and there are no access or dial-in details to speak of, or really anything else–I call them and that’s that.

But last Thursday I had a great call with Liz Heiman of Percio Strategies.  We went over a bevy of great questions of how to set up and do this or that within our coaching tool, and Liz made a great case for how useful it would be to have location and description information about an appointment appear right along side appointments within people’s calendars: vital for coordination of meeting locations and a great boon to timely attendance to have dial in information right there for attendees. » Continue reading “Delightful Collaboration VIII – Setting Location and Description for Appointments”

CoachAccountable Appointments have undergone a few more improvements lately.  Let’s take a look! » Continue reading “Appointments: Post Worksheets and Type-Specific Availability”

A major piece of CoachAccountable is scheduling and managing client appointments.  A lot of coaches ask “how do I sync my CoachAccountable appointments with my regular calendar, and how does that work?”

(By “regular calendar” I am referring to whichever online calendar system you already use regularly– Apple iCal and Microsoft Outlook are by far the most prevalent.)

CoachAccountable has a direct sync with your Google Calendar (instructions HERE), but if you use another calendar keep reading.

» Continue reading “Two Way Syncing with your Calendar”

If you use CoachAccountable to manage your appointment scheduling with clients (and this is highly recommended, by the way) you can have the appointments that you schedule with a given client pipe directly into his or her online calendar (e.g. iCal, Outlook, or Google Calendar).

This is because, in addition to calendar feeds of all appointments available for coaches, CoachAccountable offers a calendar feed for clients consisting of their appointments with you.  The setup to do this is a one-time step.  Tell your clients to find their listing of Appointments with you the next time they login (found in the column on the left), and beneath that listing they’ll see a button: “My calendar feed…”

When your client clicks the button, they’ll be given instructions on how to add their appointments with you to their online calendar of choice.

What they have for their calendar feed is exactly what you have as coach, so if you’ve added your appointment feed to your online calendar you’ll be able to talk them through the process.

Once they’ve added their appointment feed to their online calendar, any appointments you (or they) setup within CoachAccountable will automatically appear in their online calendar.

This is a nice convenience and a powerful way to integrate your coaching into the rest of their life and schedule.  Seeing their coaching appointments with you amid all of their other happenings in life provides a nice reminder to make the coaching work they are doing a priority, and might even cause them to complete one or two more assignments prior to your next session.

So let your clients know as they’re getting started with you on the platform: add the feed of their appointments with you to their online calendar of choice, and they’ll have their current and future sessions with you effortlessly added into their schedule.

CoachAccountable allows your coaching clients to schedule themselves for appointments right into your calendar.  By setting your weekly availability, you tell CA when, in a typical week, you are open to receiving appointment requests from clients:

But of course things come up.  Sometimes you have a dentist appointment at 11am on a Monday, and so you need CoachAccountable to not offer that slot to your clients for booking.

For a long time now this could be done by manually specifying these exceptional occasions, like so:

Just let CA know when you’re not available, and it will subtract out those times.

Now by popular request you can pipe a live feed of your calendar events into CoachAccountable, letting the system know directly when you have times that should thus be made unavailable for appointment scheduling with your clients.

» Continue reading “Letting CA Know When You’re Not Available for Appointments”

Between a few hang outs and a lot of phone conversations I keep bumping up against CoachAccountable being more powerful than people are discovering on their own, even with a 30 day trial.

Clearly I can do a better job of tuning CA users into all that the system is capable of.

To that end I’m happy to unveil the first of a series of videos which, in detailed fashion, illustrate the many how-to’s of using the system to greatest benefit, distilled from the experiences of myself and many other users.

This first one is titled “How to be an awesome coach with CoachAccountable Appointments”.

Enjoy!

For reference, here’s the narration transcript:

» Continue reading “Be an Awesome Coach With CoachAccountable Appointments”

Yesterday I got an email from Bryan Gilliom of Level 5 Coaching Group, a fellow who was goodly enough to reply to my “welcome, how’s it going?” email that gets sent to all coaches shortly after they grab an account¹.  In addition to giving a really nice account of what he was looking for, he let me know his wish list so far for the system.  The first on this list was this:

1) To improve my own efficiency I want to be able to send worksheets based on an appointment.  So it seems like I am going to have to remember each session to schedule a “Check in” worksheet and reminder, and I will have to schedule a pre-meeting worksheet.  This seems like repetitive work that would be better done by defining triggers tied to the appointment.

In this I love both his forwardness to ask and clarity of reasoning behind it.  (Incidentally, the second item on his wish list was essentially a request for the forthcoming Team Edition.)

To his first request I replied:

Tying a worksheet to an appointment type is a really good idea, one which I’ve toyed with in the past and am just about sold on as being worth adding.  As you might imagine my to-do list is quite flush with good ideas but I reckon I may add this sometime in the near-ish future.

Then I realized I was just a few days off from a trip to Vegas for MicroConf, and thus it wasn’t a good day for doing any major architectural wrangling for Team Edition.  Instead, a quick project was a perfect way to spend the day.  So I did just that.  And now, as of this morning, coaches can tie worksheet assignments automatically to their appointment types.  Let’s take a look.

» Continue reading “Appointment Worksheets”

One of the things technology is generally useful for is to automate a lot of grunt work and thus free up time for people, and CoachAccountable is no different in this regard.

Since the launch of the site redesign back in April, I’ve had a signature website “Coming Soon” notice on an illustrative video about how CoachAccountable helps to scale up one’s coaching practice.  “Soon” for things like this is a standard lie in the web world, and alas amid all the travel I took nearly 3 months to finally get that video together (in my defense, I was traveling through all of Cambodia, Thailand, Nepal, UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Italy during that time).

But I knew I’d get to it eventually.  I cooked up the script for it in haste back in mid-April, during the 36 hour window I had prior to my appointment at a proper sound studio to do the recordings.  With proper narration all done it was but a matter of time before I could animate it, and whilst living in Crete I found that time.

Anecdotes surrounding its creation aside, the video gives a nice illustration of the difficulty of scaling up one-to-one coaching, and how CoachAccountable can help.

Coach more people in the same amount of hours, or the same amount of people in fewer hours.  I think it’s a juicy win.

Enjoy!

Similar to the tweaks to make Actions better, I’ve added a few bits to improve Appointment scheduling as well.

Exceptions to scheduling availability

As coach you can set up your typical availability for your clients to schedule themselves into your calendar, but what about the occasional day or week off?  Sure, appointments scheduled by clients are just pending requests, subject to your approval, but missing was a way to block off bits of time before requests for not-actually-available dates were made.

Now you can add as many exceptions to your upcoming availability as necessary, and CoachAccountable will subtract those out from the scheduling options presented to your clients:

To make sure that you’ve got everything setup correctly regarding your availability (and exceptions thereto), you can now preview the options that your clients will see when they go in to schedule themselves:

See the options available for a given  appointment just as your client would.

Time zone coordination in scheduling

When scheduling an appointment with a client in a different time zone, a coach can see immediately what a given appointment time will be in that client’s time zone.  Most handy to avoid confusion to the tune of “is that in your time zone, or mine?”

As you change the time, the client time changes with it.

Scheduling a regular sequence of appointments

Often times you have a regular weekly call with a given client.  If you know it’s going to be the same for several weeks to come, you can now schedule a sequence with just a few clicks:

Just a click and the option to schedule a regular series appears.

And there you have it!  Just a few improvements to make appointment scheduling easier for you.