Google Calendar Invitations - "Unknown Sender" emails.

Are your invitees saying they're not seeing your Calendar invites? Here's why - 

Google Calendar added a new policy recently for users to help combat spam. This new policy impacts all third party scheduling tools, including Criya, Calendly etc. Events set up for calendar invitations will only be added automatically if you have had previous interaction with your invitee. For an invitees first time booking, the calendar event will not be automatically added. First time invitees will need to confirm their booking by clicking on a confirmation link within their email inbox.

What does this mean:

• Criya sends 1 email confirming the order.
• Google sends another invitation with the "event invitation".
• Unless your invitees "mark you as a known sender" - and Accept your invite - the invitation won't automatically get added. Calendly has reported the same issue we well.

Here's how the invitation looks on your Client's calendar for a first time booking.

What Criya is doing to navigate this:

1. Criya sends 1 Confirmation email with the booking details 

2. Criya then sends 2 reminder emails - 24 hours prior to the event & 1 hour prior to the event

3. Criya also sends a Follow up email, 1 hour after the event to request feedback.

What you need to do:

In order to allow calendar invitations to be added automatically within your Google Calendar, there are a few things you should tell your Invitees to do:

• Google Calendar users can manage your invitations at anytime from within their account by:
  1. Click Settings on the top right hand side of your Google calendar.
  2. Under General, select Event Settings.
  3. Under Add invitations to my calendar, select From everyone.
     
     
     
     
• Please tell your clients can click on the "I know the sender" button when presented which will add that email address to your Google Calendar safe senders list for future events to be added automatically.

- Alternatively, you can encourage your clients to set their Calendar settings to accept bookings from everyone.