Calendly’s automated meeting scheduler gets new enterprise features

Calendly, an automated meeting scheduling tool for businesses, has launched a dedicated enterprise plan with added support for businesses that need advanced security and control of their Calendly deployment. The launch comes just a few months after the Atlanta, Georgia-based company raised $350 million, its first notable external funding in its eight-year history.

Founded in 2013, Calendly is focused primarily on helping businesses schedule meetings with people outside their company, such as sales staff looking to set up a briefing with a potential client. The company claims a host of major customers including LinkedIn and Zendesk.

So far, Calendly has offered three plans — basic (free), premium ($8 per user / month), and Pro ($12 per user / month). From today, Calendly has thrown an additional enterprise plan into the mix, which includes support for identity and access management systems and standards such as single sign-on (SSO) for Okta, Ping Identity, Azure, OneLogin, and Auth0, as well as System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) which is an open standard for automating user provisioning.

Moreover, Calendly also now gives admins a centralized user management dashboard, allowing them to group users by team, location, or department and designate admins to manage each group without it impacting others.

Above: Calendly: Centralized group management

On schedule

The crux of the problem that Calendly has been setting out to solve so far is that everyone works to different schedules and priorities, with location and time zone an added hurdle to setting up an appropriate time to meet. This will usually end up with multiple emails and / or phone calls as they try to agree the most suitable time, a matter that’s compounded as the number of people involved in the meeting increases. With Calendly, the meeting organizer simply shares a scheduling link with all parties, who are then asked to choose from a set of time slots based on rules stipulated by the organizer — the chosen slot is then added to everyone’s calendars. It also has a feature called round robin, which can automatically assign meetings (such as with a sales prospect) to any available team member — this increases the chances of accommodating the invitee’s schedule.

Calendly supports integrations with myriad business apps including calendars from Google and Microsoft so that it always knows your availability, as well as CRM tools. Salesforce, for example, automatically creates a new lead whenever a meeting is scheduled with a fresh prospect — if the prospect already exists, the meeting will be added to their existing record. Separately, the Calendly API enables custom integrations.

Now, with support for SSO and SCIM, and more granular user controls for admins, Calendly is better positioned to lure companies that have requirements that are more typical to larger enterprises. Moreover, in the future, the company is planning to introduce new reporting tools, such as automatically capturing scheduling data such as cancellation and rescheduling rates, and tie this to other enterprise tools such as CRMs, which can help measure company or team goals and help managers figure out whether any changes need to be made.

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