We recently released a new feature into http://www.thecustomerfactor.com that’ll allow you to sync up your google calendar with your calendars in The Customer Factor, so for those of you who use google while you’re out and about on the road, this feature is for you!

When you’re logged into your account please mouse over the “My Account” tab and click on the “General” dropdown. You’ll see the google feature here:

I won’t go into specifics in this update because you can click on the “Click here” link as shown in screenshot above to open up the window which will provide you step by step directions on how to sync up google with The Customer Factor. However, I would like to point out a few things that are important.

When we started working on this feature, we were going to make it so that all users would be under one single API (application programming interface), but the problem is that google has a query limit for their calendars of 10,000 queries per day. A “query” is anytime an appointment transfers. So each time an appointment is scheduled in google and transfers into The Customer Factor, that’s one query. And any time a user schedules an appt. in The Customer Factor and it transfers to google, that’s one query. The problem is that with so many users using this particular feature, we’ll chew up 10,000 queries in an hour.

So what we did was make it where each individual user has to sign up for their own API. In other words, each user will have the 10,000 query limit instead of all users combined being assigned that 10,000 query limit.

With this said, you only need to sign up for the API one time. Once it’s done, it’s done. Full instructions are in the window you get when you click “Click here”. If you’re unsure of any of the steps, please call our office (850-476-0904) at anytime and we’ll walk you through it.

After you complete the process of signing up for the API and you fully enable the google feature, within 2 to 5 minutes you’ll see four new calendars display in google. They will display in the “My Calendars” section. They will be entitled: Customers, Prospects, Personal, Tasks (CF). Here’s a screenshot:

Anytime you schedule something in google, please make sure to assign it to the correct calendar. These are the only 4 calendars that The Customer Factor understands. And visa versa…anytime you schedule a customer, prospect, personal appt, or task in The Customer Factor, it will transfer into one of these 4 calendars in google.

Formatting

Let’s talk about formatting for a minute. An important point to make is that google doesn’t have specific fields like The Customer Factor does such as address, phones, city, state, etc. etc. So in order to make it so that the data you insert into google transfers into the right area in The Customer Factor, we had to apply certain formatting tactics.

This formatting is talked about further within this window that you can access from the Google preferences section in The Customer Factor:

It’s highly recommended that you click this link and review the formatting that’s needed. If you don’t incorporate the proper formatting then you may end up with data in incorrect fields in The Customer Factor for prospects/customers. It’s easy to correct though, so no problem. For example, if you happen to see in The Customer Factor that a customer’s address, city, state, and zip info is all in the customer’s Address field, then you can change it and click update.

Next, we also have made this feature so that you can share your google calendar with other users. If it’s a main user (administrator), you can add their google account email address on the my account/users screen as shown:

You can even allow subusers who are non administrators to view your calendars in google with the ability for them to not reschedule/delete appts. in google and/or with the ability for them to see only the appts. that they’ve been assigned to. You can add their google email address on the my account/users screen within the area where you limit/restrict what they can do and which pages they can view. Here’s a screenshot:

Lastly, we have yet to complete the functionality where you can import all your appointments in google to The Customer Factor. I’m referring to the ability to do one big import where you export all your appointments out of google into a csv file and import them all into The Customer Factor. This has been requested by a couple of users who have been using google for years and they’d like to be able to import everything into The Customer Factor in one fell swoop. So as it stands right now, this functionality isn’t available (yet). We’ll provide an update when it is. But everything else is good to go.

We do have plans on incorporating scheduling blocking into google and also some recurring customer/appointment functionality, so stay tuned for this. If you have any feedback, please let us know. Enjoy!

Best Regards,

Steve
Login: http://www.thecustomerfactor.com/login.php