Service for setting up appointments To make scheduling quicker and enhance its schedule management capabilities, Calendly has revamped its browser extension.
The new Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Outlook extensions house your meetings and allow you to join, cancel, or postpone them. Still, it only displays meetings scheduled with Calendly. The firm said that depending on user input, it would look at adding further features to the extension.
The new “Contacts” page, along with your meeting history, displays your upcoming appointments with the people in them.
Along with sharing links to various meeting types (like longer or shorter sessions), the extension also allows you to quickly schedule a follow-up call with someone attending the current meeting.
Calendly is extending its feature set generally as well. Customers can now schedule multiple meetings in a single time slot and even give one meeting priority over another. Though the company says it is considering integrating some kind of intelligence to provide recommendations to assist with prioritizing, you still need to manually prioritize your appointments.
A function enabling members of marketing or sales teams to schedule calls on behalf of their colleagues is another feature the firm is launching. To modify their schedules, coworkers must grant the group access.
The business claims that this plugin, together with interfaces to services like Gmail and LinkedIn, tries to cut down on the amount of time individuals spend hopping between websites and apps.
Looking past the timetable.
In an interview with Eltrys, Chief Product Officer Stephen Hsu of Calendly stated that the company wants to go beyond scheduling and become a helpful solution throughout the meeting life cycle. Specifically, he said, the organization intends to concentrate on assisting individuals in getting ready for meetings and offering commentary both during and after them.
Hsu said that the firm intends to enter the meeting transcription market. He added, “Some of our customers use tools like Otter or Zoom Assistant, but they manage them independently and integrate them, not always easily.” By obtaining information via its connections with platforms like Salesforce and LinkedIn, the business also hopes to provide users with additional details about attendance and the meeting agenda. Plus, he said, Calendly could import information from past meetings and action items.
To take notes using Calendly, you must now launch the online application. Hsu said the organization plans to relocate this component to a more convenient location, such as the expansion.
Giving their availability across time zones has become easy for users using tools like Notion Calendar, Vimcal, Akiflow, and Amie. Calendly said it is working to improve the invitee experience and simplify scheduling meetings across different time zones.
Making meeting tools smarter with AI
Meeting-related products abound, from large companies like Zoom to startups like Limitless (formerly Rewind AI) that want to use AI to better understand the data produced during meetings.
Calendly also intends to use AI to enhance its offerings. The firm claims it intends to develop a model that can use meeting data and information from CRM platforms to provide a more comprehensive view of a meeting.
Hsu added, “It will be very powerful if we can build a model that enables the user to access any kind of information across that entire meeting life cycle from anywhere, whether it’s in Slack or a new conversational interface in Calendly.”
