Riva Bookings User Guide

With Riva Bookings, you can now reduce email scheduling back and forth by up to 85%!

Contents: 

1. Signing into Riva Bookings
2. Settings
3. Creating an availability link
4. Using your availability links
5. Signature Link
6. Single Use Link
7. Recipient experience
8. Email flow
9. Important notes

Signing into Riva Bookings

​Once your organization has been configured for Riva Bookings, the online web portal will be available for you to start using. To start creating availability links for easy scheduling, you have two options to access online: 

1. Navigate to https://byriva.com. You will be prompted to enter in your email. Based on your email domain, Riva will show the suitable sign in method.
   1. If your organization uses Office 365 or Exchange Online, you can sign in via "Sign in with Microsoft"
   2. If your organization uses Exchange On Premise, you will need to manually enter in your Microsoft email and password 
2. Navigate to https://{your-company-domain}.byriva.com. You will be able to by pass entering the email and will be shown the suitable sign in method right away.
   1. Your company domain is most likely your email domain. For example, if it is alex@herbsherb.com, the domain will herbsherb. If not, contact your Riva admin.
3. Sign in through Riva Insight with our Riva Bookings Integration.

Settings

After you log in for the first time, it's recommended that you configure your settings via "Settings" under your profile

Meeting Preferences

• My Availability Link: The URL is the link that you would be sending to recipients; by default, this is generated using your first name and last name. However, you can change this part of the URL to be even more personalized!
• Online Meetings:
  • Currently, we offer 2 different online meetings integration, Zoom and Microsoft Teams
  • For both, toggling them on will enable Zoom and Teams integration, which means that they can be selected as the location choice when you are creating an availability link.
  • Use my personal id field for Zoom: You can also select whether a random meeting ID will be generated, or if your Personal Meeting ID will be used in the Zoom link.

• Advanced Options: This section will allow you to enable any kind of smart scheduling options, These settings will be selected by default for any new availability link you create.

  • Show first slot per day at a time: With this option on, recipient can only see one time slot available for each day of the week. This is useful if you don’t want to be booked at random times throughout the whole day, but want your meetings to be stacked. For example, if my availability on Monday is 9am to 5pm for a 30 minute meeting and I am currently completely free during those times, the first recipient can only see 9am as available. The next person will only see 9:30am as available.

  • Add Pre/Post buffer time: building on the setting above, maybe you don’t want to have back to back meetings. This allows you to take some break between meetings. In the case above, if recipient requested a meeting from 9 to 9:30 am, and I set a 15 minute pre and post buffer, the next person can only book me before 8:45am or after 9:45am. 

  • Recipient can book ahead: When we send a link to a recipient, we don’t want them to book for next year as that is too far ahead. This limits how far ahead a recipient can book ahead. If it is October right now and I set this setting to 1 month, the recipient can only book ahead until November.

  • Minimum notice for recipient to book meeting: As a organizer, I may need time to prepare for a meeting. I don't want a situation where someone books a meeting 15 from now. This setting allows me to control the earliest someone can book a time with me.

  • Manually Approve Meeting Requests: This allows the organizer to review incoming meeting requests and approve them to create meeting appointment across everyone’s calendar. If not enabled, all meeting requests are automatically approved.  

  • Display recipient name in meeting tile: Riva will append the recipient’s name in the meeting title so that the organizer can get a quick view of upcoming meetings.

  • Mark meeting types as unavailable: Organizers have the option to open more meeting slots by showing ‘tentative’ meetings (or other statuses) as available time.  

Default Availability

• This is where you can set the default availability that is shown when you create your availability link. Of course this can be overwritten if you choose to.
• Usually, you would set your work hours as the default availability

Create an Availability Link

Create availability links to send to your email recipients so they can request to book a meeting with you for a chosen date and time.

You can have one or multiple availability links and choose which one to send depending on your scheduling needs! 

For example, I might have a general meeting link for "General Meeting", one for "Customer Support Call" and another for a "Sales Meeting" with a potential client.

Create a new availability link 

Click on "Add a new Availability Link", which will open up a creation panel. 

Add Meeting Details

1. Meeting Title: Subject of the meeting invitation.  

2. Description: Meeting description for the invitation.  

3. Location: Organizers can create multiple options for location(s) that a user can choose while selecting a meeting slot. This can range from multiple online platforms, such as, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or In person (location address is provided by the organizer). Organizer also can set a default location for the meeting, which will be the pre-selected option when recipients view the availability link. 

1. Location: When an online option is selected, the organizer can choose from Microsoft Teams meeting, Zoom Meeting, or add a custom option. Choosing this option will automatically create a team or Zoom meeting link which is added to the description of the invitation for ease. 

4. Duration: Organizers have the option to select multiple durations for a meeting and set a default option for the meeting. The client can select their preferred duration.  

Add Internal Attendees

Select who will be the participants of this meeting from your organization.

1. Meeting Host: Owner & organizer for the meeting. This option is used to support delegation use case.  

2. Required Internal Attendees: Riva will find a cross section of time that is available for all attendees. 

3. Optional Internal Attendees: Riva will not look to find a time in their calendar and these attendees will be invited to meetings by default. Helps to stay in loop without forwarding invitations to internal attendees.  

Select Availability Times

Based on the availability you set here, link recipients will only be able to book times you are free based on your outlook calendar's availability and the time frames you choose for the availability link.  

Availability of the meeting host is shown by default which can be overwritten by setting custom availability according to their needs. Riva allows for multiple blocks of hours in the same day and the available slots are dynamically updated. The availability is based on what you set under “Default Availability” settings.

Advanced Options

This section will allow you to enable any kind of smart scheduling options. By default, the settings will be what you set in "Meeting Preferences". Making changes here will overwrite "Meeting Preferences" for select availability link.

To learn more about the advanced options, refer to Meeting Preferences.

Publish

From here, you can click on “Publish” and your link will show up as a card on the home page! You can also choose to move to previous steps via the back button if you want to change any details.

Once your link has been published, you can delete, edit, view or copy a link. For now, I will focus on delete and edit and view.

1. Delete: This will delete your availability link
2. Edit: you can edit any details of the availability link. Make the necessary changes and click on close & save to make changes or click delete Link to completely delete the link
3. Preview: This allows you to see the view of what the link recipient will see
4. Clone: Create a duplicate availability link so that you don't have to create one from scratch

Using your availability links

In order to have recipients request a meeting with you, you will need to send it to the necessary recipients. There are a couple ways to do this.

Manually copy and paste: On the Riva Bookings Home page, click on "Copy link" button on any of the cards you wish to use. Navigate to your communication platform like email or messaging platform and paste it in. Send to your recipient.

Use Riva Insight: Learn how you can insert availability links directly from Riva Insight here.

Signature Link

Signature link is a type of availability link intended to be inserted into your email signature or on your website to make your availability always accessible to customers. As this link cannot be deleted, you don’t have to worry about the link being broken when customers try to use it. When you log in to your account for the very first time, signature link details are already filled out with basic information so that you can get started right away.  Of course, you have the option to edit the link to suit your needs. The experience of a signature link is exactly same as an availability link except that as signature link is meant for you specifically, you cannot delegate or add other additional internal attendees.

Single Use Links

For more one-time meetings that you do not want to store as an availability like, or for meetings that you don't want to expose your whole calendar for, we have a new type of link called a "Single Use Link". Let's walk through the experience of creating one.

Step 1: Enter Details

Everything is same as the details you enter in for an availability link, the only difference is that you can only select 1 duration.

Step 2: Add Attendees

Again, everything is same as adding attendees for an availability link. Note that delegation is also supported.

Step 3: Select your availability

Rather than selecting recurring time ranges that you are available weekly, you will be manually selecting the exact timeslots that you want to show as available. Note that you can select already busy slots. The reserve selected times toggle will create temporary "HOLD" meetings in your calendar wherever you marked yourself as available so that you don't overbook those slots with another meeting. 

As you are manually selecting the times, there is no need to have "additional options" step as you do for availability links.

Once you have published the single use link, you can either copy the single use link or copy a text template which lists all the time slots that was marked as available. The link will expire once it has been used or after its last selected availability slot.

 Recipient's Experience

When a recipient clicks on the availability link, they are redirected to a page on the web browser to request a meeting with you. Here is the experience for the recipient.

Step 1: Select Date and Time

Calendar: Shows the available days that work across all internal required attendees. You can set the duration via "Duration" dropdown if multiple durations are available.

Time Slots: Shows the available time slots that work across all internal required attendees. You can view timeslots in different time zones using the "View available times in" dropdown.

Step 2: Enter Details (as a recipient)

1. Name:  Recipient to enter their name 

2. Email:  Recipient to enter their email 

4. Location: Multiple meeting location provide by the organizer. Recipient can choose an option to their liking  

5. Invite Guests: Recipients can add emails of people they want to invite to the meeting  

6. Additional Notes: Recipients have the option to add additional notes for the organizer.  

Step 3: Complete

• Recipient can now close the window and wait for a confirmation email

Email Flow

1. Recipient clicks on "Request Meeting" through the recipient experience described above
2. Initial Emails:
   • If "Manually Accept Meeting Requests" is turned on, meeting host receives a email to approve or cancel the meeting request
   • If "Manually Accept Meeting Requests" is turned off, calendar event is created automatically with the meeting host set as the organizer
3. From here, all meetings are treated like any other calendar event
4. There is also an option to reschedule or cancel the meeting for any meeting participant (there is a reschedule or a cancel link in bottom of the emails and calendar events)