Allow Meeting start times to flexibly change with availability and selected durations

HubSpot Ideas
1

When setting custom availability from 11:30 - 2:30, with duration to of an hour. I would hope a recipient could choose options for 11:30, 11:45, 12, 12:15, 12:30 etc. However, because the meeting duration is an hour, the recipient can only choose 11:30, 12:30 and 1:30.

Is there a reason we don’t display the in-between times (like noon or 1)?

There are other calendar tools, Calendly and Appointlet, that let you set the start time offsets. So you could display your available times in increments of 30 minutes. And then the available times will update accordingly if meetings are booked.

2

Thanks for posting this Hannah! Something went wrong when I tried to post, so here’s the text I originally wrote up, along with two suggestions for the change. Rob

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If you are available all day from 9am-5pm, and have made 30 and 60 minute meetings available, then people can book 30 minute meetings beginning at 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, 10:30, etc.
However, they will only be able to book 60 minute meetings starting on the hour, at 9am, 10am, 11am, etc. They should be able to book a meeting (for example) from 10:30 - 11:30. Even more perversely, if you are available from 8:30am, then the 60 minute meeting slots will begin

at 8:30, 9:30, 10:30, etc. There’s no way someone can arrange a meeting on the hour with you now.

This is an odd oversight, and one that other services (eg: Calendly) have solved without trouble, and without further complicating the UX. (BTW: I can definitely see why some users would NOT want more granularity. The existing set-up does make sure that meetings are as tightly packed as possible.)

My recommendation would be to go with either of the following:
Option 1: New Defaults, no changes to UI
For meetings of 30 minutes or more, allow the meeting to begin on the hour or half-hour. EG: for a 60 minute meeting, the visitor would automatically be offered meeting times at 9, 9:30, 10, 10:30, etc.
Option 2: Customizable, new setting in UI
For each meeting type, the Hubspot user would be see a new option, allowing them to select the granularity of potential start times for this meeting type. The options might be 5min, 10min, 15min, 30min, 60min.
So for example, if the user selected 15 minutes, then meetings of this type could be booked at 9am, 9:15, 9:30, 9:45, 10am, 10:15, 10:30, etc.

Example screenshots:

schedule-hubspot.PNG.jpg
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My schedule as it appears in the Hubspot meeting planner. Meetings can only start on the hour.

schedule-calendly.PNG
schedule-calendly.PNG884×1564 40.4 KB

My schedule for the same day, as it appears in the Calendly meeting planner. Meetings can start at whatever time is convenient for the other party.

3

Our current meeting scheduler, Appointlet, allows you to set the frequency of when meetings can be booked. For example, if I set the frequency to 15 minutes and my calendar has a 2 hour block of time available, it will present appt. times for 10:00, 10:15, 10:30, 10:45, etc.
Currently in HubSpot meetings, the meeting frequency is set by the meeting length. If I have an hour-long meeting, the appt. presented to a customer are in hour increments, like 10:00 and then 11:00, etc. This minimizes the options for our customers and is a big drawback.

4

I agree. I just emailed support about this yesterday figuring it was a bug. If someone wants to set up a one-hour meeting with me and my calendar is fully open starting from 8:30 am, if they want a one hour meeting that starts at 9, they should be able to book it. Currently, they can only choose from 8:30 am or 9:30 am.

5

The HubSpot calendar system should allow for the scheduler to be able to select the start time and show calendar availability based on the start time.

6

Thank you for posting Hannah! I agree as well.

I offer 1.5 hour long trainings and I want to be more flexible for my clients. I am able to do this on my free account of https://youcanbook.me/.

7

If I could give this 100 upvotes I would.

Hubspot is a beautiful, all-in-one system for marketing and sales; however, the one tool our sales team avoids like the plague is the meetings tool, strictly because of this oversight.

If someone wants to meet at 1:00pm and you have 12:30pm - 2:30pm free, then you should absolutely be able to schedule it at 1:00pm. Until this is fixed unfortunately we’re forced to use Calendly, which is in every way inferior to Hubspot, except Calendly can schedule every 30 minutes even if it’s a 60 minute meeting.

Hopefully this is resolved 2018!

8

We just moved from Appointlet to HS Meetings, not realizing that HS Meetings has this issue. We’d love to see this get addressed as it can lead to missing opportunities with prospects that need more available booking options.

9

Hello all,

We’re looking at some options to priovide your prospects with more flexibility on the booking page. In the example below, a prospect is booking a 30 minute meeting, and is provided with options falling on the quarter-hour.

(link expired)

If you comment in the link, I’ll be able to collect the feedback all in one place.

10

@mlahens I just got back to the office, so I missed your message last week, and that link has expired. Please could you repost it?

11

Yup, the handling of meeting start times is definitely one of the reasons I’ve resisted moving to HubSpot meetings. You just implemented the ability to generate custom meeting links in Zoom (Yay!). But if I want to have a 5min or a 15min buffer at the end of each meeting, this can make meeting availability start at screwy times like 12:25 or 3:35, which is easy to miss in a calendar. We need the ability to lock starting times at, like, half hour or 15min intervals, and this would also include - as others are stating here - the ability to book a 1hr meeting starting at 12:00pm, and not just 11:30am and 12:30pm because my open block starts at 11:30am. Giving attendees more flexible booking options and making sure that start times are locked to sensible hour intervals is something that AppointmentCore and Calendly have worked out, and HubSpot should just copy that so I can confidently move over.

12

Upvote x1000!

Just make a checkbox of 0-55 in 5 minute increments.

If calendar time is available AND duration + buffer time is free is less does not equal booked time, allow recipient to book.

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14

This feature is definitely needed. People need to be able to have flexible start times in their day and still be able to book meetings on 30 minute, 15 minute, 45 minute, and hour marks. Otherwise this is severely limiting.

15

Hello, thank you for providing your feedback and upvoting this feature. The feature is currently in beta testing. I will post an update when it is ready to go live to all users.

Thank you,

Iuliia Palma

Product manager, HubSpot Sales Hub

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17

I’d like to volunteer to be added to the beta users!

18

Hi all! I’m very pleased to announce that we now calculate available times to optimize booking opportunities for you! As part of the beta, we heard feedback from some of you that the increased flexibility hindered some use cases where you want meetings to still only be available at the top of the hour, etc. so we have also introduced a new setting, “Start time increment” under Configuration > Advanced settings. Thank you for your feedback!

19

I’d like to see this functionality as well as the ability to set increments other than 15 minutes. We run a sales operation that has more calls happening that 15 minutes increments.

20

Also, we need an option for 45 minute meetings.