Greater Control Over Google Calendar Notifications and Event Updates

Many RTOs rely on the Google Calendar integration to automatically send workshop invitations and updates to trainers, clients and other stakeholders.

While the integration provides useful automation, there is currently very limited control over how calendar updates and cancellations are communicated to different attendee groups.

We have experienced situations where updating workshop details (such as assigning or changing a trainer) has resulted in Google Calendar sending cancellation notifications to client contacts, even though the workshop itself has not been cancelled. This creates confusion for clients, generates unnecessary enquiries and can undermine confidence in the booking process.

aXcelerate Support has advised that Google Calendar currently treats events as a whole and does not differentiate between recipient types when automated updates or cancellations are triggered. As a result, any changes made to a workshop may generate notifications to all attendees without giving the RTO visibility or control over who receives them

 

Suggested Improvements:

Provide greater control over calendar notifications, including:

• Ability to choose which attendee types receive calendar updates.
• Ability to choose which attendee types receive cancellation notifications.
• Separate notification settings for Trainers, Client Users, Students and Administrators.
• Option to suppress calendar notifications for specific workshop changes (e.g. trainer assignment, trainer replacement, venue changes).
• Ability to send update notifications instead of cancellation notifications when workshop details are modified.
• Audit log showing which calendar notifications have been generated and sent.
• Ability to preview or review automated calendar communications before they are distributed.
• Ability to exclude client contacts from operational workshop updates while still notifying trainers.

We believe greater control over calendar notifications will reduce client confusion and provide a better experience for our employers and booking contacts.  For organisations delivering large volumes of employer-funded training, trainer allocations and workshop details can change regularly. These operational changes should not automatically trigger cancellation notifications to clients when the workshop itself has not been cancelled. Greater control over recipient-specific calendar notifications would significantly improve communication accuracy and customer experience.