Overview
The no-show (abandoned) meeting feature automatically releases a room when nobody shows up to a scheduled meeting. This frees the room up for others who may want to use it and makes it easy to keep outdated recurring meetings from piling up in your conference rooms.
How it works
When nobody checks into a scheduled meeting within a customizable time window, Robin will release the room. People can check in to meeting rooms by tapping "Check-in " or scanning a QR code on the display app (captured below) or by confirming the space ahead of time from the mobile app, Slack/Teams integration, or the web dashboard.
How to set up the Abandoned Meeting Protection feature
In order for the Abandoned Meeting Protection feature to work properly, you need to have room displays set up and configure a few settings. Follow the steps outlined below to get started.
Step 1. Set up room displays
Before enabling the Abandoned Meeting Protection setting, you must pair room displays with spaces. Skip to step 2 if you already have room displays set up.
Step 2: Set the meeting confirmation window
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Use the Meeting Confirmation Window setting to control how far in advance users can check into meetings. The default confirmation window is 2 hours to check-in for your meeting.
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You can customize the confirmation window for your organization under Manage > Organization > Event Customizations section.
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Set a confirmation window that works best for your team, ranging from 10 minutes to 12 hours.
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Step 3: Turn on the Abandoned Meeting Protection & the Meeting Check-in setting
You can enable these features for an entire office building or specific spaces only.
- In the web dashboard, navigate to Manage > Offices > select a building location or space.
- From the space or building management page, locate the “Display scheduling” section.
- Toggle ON the Abandoned meeting protection setting.
- Toggle ON the Meeting check-ins setting. This setting enables a meeting check-in button on the room displays.
Step 5: Set the abandoned threshold
You can manage how long users have to check in to their meeting before it's automatically canceled with the Abandoned Threshold setting. The default is 10 minutes, but choose the amount of time, in minutes, that works for your office. (See above)
An optional setting to consider (not required)
Implement a strike policy for recurring events
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The Strikes for Recurring Events feature aims to recover free space from meetings that have been long forgotten. Set the number of times a recurring meeting can consecutively go unattended before Robin clears it permanently from the schedule (see above).
What to expect
Will events be deleted completely from the calendar?
In most cases, the event is removed from the space's calendar only, freeing the space up for others to use. Meeting organizers and attendees will still see the full meeting and its full duration on their calendars.
The only exception is when the space is the organizer of the event. This can happen when people book directly on the space's calendar and add themselves as an invitee, as is the case for some Microsoft users booking through Robin's web dashboard. Updating permissions to allow users to book as themselves will resolve this.
To avoid surprises, the event organizer will receive email notifications when their event is removed from the room's schedule. See the examples below.
One-time event (non-recurring):
A recurring meeting + organization has the strike rule enabled:
The notification will include how many strikes the organizer has left until the event is completely removed from the room calendar.
A recurring meeting + hit the max strike threshold:
Therefore all future reservations in the recurring meeting series are removed as well.
Common Pitfalls
- Make sure your booking user has read/write access on the room calendars. This is critical for Google users and happens when the connected booking user doesn't have the right permissions to modify other people's events. If you see an error on your display when attempting to remove an abandoned meeting, this is why.
- Meetings that are 8 hours or more in length do not require confirmation and will not remove the meeting if abandoned. If you create a meeting within your organization's meeting confirmation window (see above), Robin will automatically confirm the meeting and will not require check-in.
Insights
The Space Cancellations dashboard is a great resource for analyzing space booking cancellations and the method used.
If you have Advanced Analytics, use the "Recaptured time" chart on the Usage page on the Space Bookings tab. This section illustrates how much of that released time is used for ad hoc events.
Information about abandoned meetings can also be found in the dashboard exports. Look for the "Automatically unbooked at" column in the export.