The Appointment Custom Values in Automations

Hello, Sonny. Hey, Sonny, how are you doing? Howdy.

I'm doing good. Good to see you, man. It's nice and warm here.

Okay, I'm jealous right away because it's like the ice is coming out of the taps over here. So it's definitely chillie this morning. Good to hear that you're nice and warm though, bro. How's business?

It's getting there. We're moving closer. So I had just a visualization question, really, for the custom values and stuff. I downloaded or I uploaded, of course, a couple of snapshots into my GHL account.


Cool.

With those snapshots came some workflows and pre written emails. Just an example, some of the custom values were in there was the appointment start time, the meeting location and a bunch of other things. I'm having trouble visualizing where is the start time going to come from? Do I have to input that custom value manually into my custom values bar? Because I went in there and search for the appointment start time or search for the appointment meeting location and there isn't one in there. Do I have to.

Do a Screen share? Do you want.


To do a screen share? Yeah. Do you want to do a screen share, Sonny? And we'll jump in and see if I can nail that down for you. Whenever you're importing a snapshot, custom values are what drives snapshots. So you can literally get that in and all the custom values fill out emails and that stuff. So this particular one is our appointment confirmation and reminder. Okay, cool. So you're looking here, scrolling down. Okay, so you've got appointment start time. So these are not so much custom values as they are... Sorry, these are not custom... They are custom values, but they've come from already in the system. So where it says appointment start time and appointment meeting location, scroll all the way to the top of this workflow. The very first thing is the trigger. Go to the left, go to the actual workflow itself, go all the way up, appointment request. So the appointment itself is the trigger. So in this particular workflow, a customer setting an appointment fires off the rest of the things. An appointment has a start time, has a finish time, has a location, which is normally a Zoom link. It's the appointment itself that creates those appointment related custom values.

So when you're building a workflow, certain custom values fill in specifically to that workflow, and appointments are a good example of one. So you've got appointment start time, appointment meeting location. Hang on, just pause for a second because I can see what you're thinking. If you didn't have an appointment in this workflow anywhere, those wouldn't fill out. They'd be like, What appointment? I don't know what you mean. But because you have an appointment in the workflow, it takes everything from that appointment time. So the other things that you hovered over there right now, so if you can go to custom values, you've got the appointment one which has got all that information in it. So that pulls from that appointment itself. The other one, which is the right now scrolling down, that's where you can insert just literally dates and times. So it can be something like, Hi, John. I saw you clicked on my email at insert time right now here on insert date right now here. So it's like whatever you're using as the right now is literally the date and time of this minute of this instance. But if you're using the custom values from the appointment, it pulls that from the trigger itself.

Got you. So there's a bunch of custom values that populate from different things. This custom values within the custom values, this custom values within the custom values this is what's actually in.


My sidebar. In your custom values. Yeah, in your settings and custom values. I got you. That menu pops up everywhere through the program. Those custom values, they're always the last one on the bottom, the custom values are the ones that you fill out manually. That's your settings custom values. You'll be able to fill those out yourself. Actually, if you go up to custom values again one more time. So drop that box down, go into contact at the top and then go all the way to the bottom of that menu, you will find another custom menu and that's custom fields. There you go. Custom fields populate from each individual contact. So if we're sending it to John Smith and John has answered the question of LGP purchase amount, it'll pull the information from that specific customer. So you've got custom values that you fill in. They become across the whole company. So you can fill in my name is Walt and I fill in a custom value Walt. I could insert that custom value everywhere through anywhere, social posts or any automations. Custom values. I've got custom values that pull from the different section of the program, which we saw before, appointments and right now.

Then I've got custom fields which are specific to one customer at a time.

Got you. Cool. Sounds good. Is that helpful? Really quick, while we're here, I know you said this as appointment status. What's the difference? When would I use appointment status versus customer booked an appointment? What is the difference between these?

Great question. Bit of history. The second one there, the customer booked appointment didn't exist up until about three months ago. We build everything on appointment status. Right now, if I was building these automations again, I would build it based on customer book deployment. It's just easier. Imagine that you have a sales team, like you've got 10 people in a team and appointments are getting booked into calendars all the time and they don't get confirmed until the salesperson has qualified the lead as an example. Just again, paint the scenario. So we've got a customer comes in and books an appointment, but it's not confirmed until the salesperson calls the day before and says, just making sure we're on for tomorrow. The customer says, Yeah, we're on for tomorrow. Great. Then I can change the status to confirmed and it would fire off. So the status of the appointments used to be the only way we could build the rest of the automations, but now we can build based on customer booked appointments. In this particular workflow, Sonny, they do the same thing. It's literally, we use a calendar just to say, yeah, the appointment is booked.

And in that calendar itself, when you're setting up the calendar, you would have seen you can set the status to be auto confirmed or Google confirmed on booking. That fires the workflow. But the customer booked appointment one is new or newer and does the same thing. So if you're building any new automations, you can build it based on customer booked appointment. Cool.

Perfect. Thank you.

Awesome, man. You're welcome. Good to see you. Let me click on stop. Let me go and we will.