Job scheduling software

Customizable APIs for Job Scheduling Software

5 min read

Thousands of small businesses that provide integral services such as pool upkeep, carpet cleaning, house painting, landscaping, and HVAC systems maintenance need job scheduling software to help keep track of their customers and their appointments throughout the day. In businesses that rely so heavily on coordinating schedules between customer and company, streamlining workflows is critical to day-to-day functioning and future growth. It’s no surprise then that small business owners are actively searching for a simple but effective job scheduling software to meet their needs. In order to increase user engagement and retention and to continue to scale your app at pace, integrating easy-to-use job scheduling software that streamlines your users’ workflow is a strategic way to improve your bottom line.

Features to Increase User Engagement and Retention

With the Nylas Calendar API, world-class security, and the capability to connect to every calendar provider in the world for bi-directional sync and full CRUD functionality is just the start. Let’s take a look at a few features of job scheduling software that can set you apart from your competitors.

Custom Calendar Reminders

Custom calendar reminders can increase your users’ revenue by reducing the amount of manual administrative scheduling they have to do to grow their business. Following up with their customers is a key step for your users when scheduling and completing a job, but manually sending reminders takes up time and energy better spent on high-value tasks. A powerful and compelling feature of job scheduling software is custom calendar reminders.

The Nylas Calendar API provides the  Nylas Scheduler, which lets you quickly easily embed front-end scheduling UI elements, along with leveraging the back-end sync engine. Your users’ third-party provider calendar is bi-directionally synced with your application in real-time so that all information is up-to-date. 

The Nylas Scheduler makes it simple to configure scheduler webhooks. First, let’s take a look at how you might create a Scheduling Page by sending a POST request:

curl -X POST https://schedule.api.nylas.com/manage/pages -d '
       {
        "name":"Patty’s Pools",
        "slug": "team-1234",
        "access_tokens": ["XXXX"],
        "config": {
        "timezone": "America/Los_Angeles",
        "event": {
        "duration": 45,
        "location": "Phoenix, Arizona",
        "title": "Northside Neighborhood"
        },
        "appearance": {
        "color": "#ff0000"
        },
        "booking": {
        "opening_hours": [{
        "days": ["M", "T", "W", "R", "F"],
        "start": "09:00",
        "end": "17:00"
        }]
        },
        "reminders": []
        }
       }'

Creating a custom calendar reminder is as easy as passing in an object to the ‘reminders’ attribute with ‘deliivery_method: webhook’ and the pertinent reminder information.

 "reminders": [
   {
     "delivery_method": "webhook",
     "delivery_recipient": "both",
     "time_before_event": 60, // minutes
     "webhook_url": "https://example.com/api/booking-webhook"
   }
 ]

Virtual Calendars 

You can demonstrate your customer obsession by addressing your users’ specific use cases for job scheduling software. For example, your user may be a carpet cleaning company that has multiple carpet cleaning machines to coordinate in order to make sure each machine is effectively used and maximizing resources. However, manually tracking, scheduling, and double-checking each machine is a huge headache and error-prone.

In comes Virtual Calendar! Virtual Calendar is ideal for situations where your users need to schedule events for people or objects that aren’t associated with a calendar account, allowing you to provide full scheduling functionality to your users without requiring them to connect with a third-party service provider. This means that managing schedules for non-human objects is a breeze. 

With Virtual Calendars, you can create any number of Virtual Calendars to represent any type of object. For example, a carpet cleaning company could create a Virtual Calendar for each of the carpet cleaning machines to automate the process of managing their availability.

Don’t Build It Yourself; Save Time and Money with Nylas

You may have considered building job scheduling software yourself. However, after nearly a decade of experience, we know the challenges of building the integration yourself. Here are just a few:

  • Calendar Connectivity – Figuring out secure authentication for real-time bi-directional sync for every calendar provider in the world; automatically identifying primary calendars for booking, and incorporating different defaults for each provider.
  • Recurring Events – Complex protocols differ from provider to provider; navigating one- off changes and timezone transitions.
  • Availability Logic – Getting to the bottom of pre-fetching and caching availability of participants to be resilient to downtime and latency spikes and using provider webhooks and event streams to keep caches up-to-date.
  • Time Zone Support – Deducting time zone information given a complex array of data from the provider and normalizing for timezones across hemispheres.
  • Event Reminders – Accounting for the many common vagaries of scheduling; everything from language consistency to making sure the guest is notified if the meeting has been cancelled even if they haven’t already declined.
  • Building Scheduling UI –  Sussing out all the edge cases your users may run into and making sure each workflow is intuitively designed.
  • Race Conditions – Implementing instant synchronization so that users don’t get double booked when two people try to book the same slot simultaneously. At the same time, making sure that the solution doesn’t impact sync speed. 

It takes tens of thousands of hours for a talented team of senior engineers to scope the project, test it, build a POC, pursue the security certificates, push the POC live, and maintain the integration(s). Implement job scheduling software with Nylas and increase user engagement and retention while saving time and money. Sign up and try the API for free today, or schedule time to speak to a platform specialist now.

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