How Does Cronofy Work?

We want to give you more time to work on what's really important. That’s why we created our original calendar API, and that’s why we’re always developing new features for you to use. This guide will explain a bit more about how our products work together to help you build the best scheduling software for your users. That way, you can develop new features, attract new customers, and grow your business...all faster than if you'd built the integration yourself. Here's a quick look at the structure of our products and how they work with the major calendar services and your software:

Calendar API

Our Calendar API is at the heart of what we do. It connects your software to the five largest calendar services – Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Outlook.com, and Microsoft Exchange (including on-premise).If you were to build these integrations separately, it would be a costly and time-consuming process. You'd also have to maintain those connections and ensure your software works with past, present, and future versions of those calendar services. Before you know it, you’re drowning in calendar APIs and the sea is only getting deeper. We built our calendar API so that you don’t need to worry about all of that. It connects to all major calendar services. You work with one API, not five. Instead of it taking months to build calendar sync into your software, it takes weeks. Maybe even days. Not only that, but your software will appeal to a wider range of customers because of its ability to adapt to their favorite calendar software.

Enterprise Connect

Enterprise Connect gives real-time scheduling features to everyone within a team or organization. Instead of each person needing to authorize calendar connectivity individually, everyone is added automatically. This means that team members new and old can benefit from calendar sync right away. Your customer has full control over who is calendar connected and when. That means that if only the sales team needs calendar sync to organize their meetings, it’s quick and easy to set up. Should the marketing team need calendar sync at a later date, the administrator can add them just as easily. There's no need to rely on individuals to authorize calendar access.

Data security and location (US or EU)

You can choose between having your data hosted in the US or the EU. Both sites abide by even the strictest data security rules and are GDPR compliant. They also offer the same features and functionality.

Availability API

Our Availability API builds on top of our real-time calendar sync. Each time a request is made to someone’s calendar, it searches for that person’s availability in real-time. This prevents any double-bookings and creates a far better user experience. When using our Availability API, you also have the option to add buffers around the times your software searches for. These ensure that there’s space between each calendar appointment. For instance, if you want to ensure that interviewers have half an hour to prepare before an interview, you can add this to the call to our Availability API. Buffers can be set for before and after an event. They won't appear as calendar events themselves, but any other events scheduled will work around them.

Intelligent Sequencing

Intelligent Sequencing is really where all of our components start to come together. It works out the best day and time for a series of events based on users’ schedules. This is perfect for organizing multi-part interviews. No matter how many people or parts are involved in that particular day, it will do all of the heavy lifting for your users. Say your customer wants to hold a multi-part interview that consists of a meeting with HR, a discussion with the team leader, then a discussion with the team. Once the interview panel's calendars are connected, the interview organizer selects the order in which these parts need to take place. We work out the rest.

Real-Time Scheduling

Real-Time Scheduling is a UI component that works with all of our other features to provide a simple scheduling experience. When you add it to your software, you can create a streamlined booking experience for everyone involved. While it was initially built with the HR market in mind, our customers have used it within booking solutions in healthcare, customer service, education, and much more. Say you have 10 interviews to schedule. You need to speak to the interview panel to find their availabilities, then reach out to each of the candidates to find which time best suits them. If you reach out to them all at the same time there’s always the risk of two candidates picking the same slot. Then the scheduling headache continues. Using Real-Time Scheduling, your customers can avoid all of that. Real-Time Scheduling plugs into your software. Once the calendars of the interview panel are connected to Cronofy, their work scheduling the interview is done. If they use Enterprise Connect, they don’t need to do a thing. Once the interview panel is connected, all the interview organizer needs to do is login and select the members of the panel. Real-Time Scheduling will then find times that work for every member of the panel and only offer those times. Should a member of the interview panel change, or a new appointment arrive in their calendar, it updates automatically. The hiring manager can then generate a booking link. They can send this booking link to as many candidates as they need to. It takes the same amount of time to schedule one interview as it does one hundred. Hiring managers and interview panelists are given more time to prepare for the interview itself. You can brand the Real-Time Scheduling plugin and the authorization page to match your design. This ensures that your branding is consistent while still offering your customers the power of Cronofy.

‍Get in touch to discuss your product's needs, or try our API for yourself.

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