The title may be a little misleading – this blog entry is not about increasing the number of appointments. It’s about not receiving a reply from an electronic meeting request.
Over the last year, I began having problems with meeting request responses. When certain people accepted or declined a meeting request, it never made it to my inbox. The problem was becoming more of a nuisance over the last 3 or 4 months.
When I called people to confirm the meeting, they told me that they already responded and were surprised that I hadn’t received their confirmation. Since we offer a premium email service, Hosted Exchange, some people enjoyed giving me a hard time. I don’t mind jokes at my expense, but our company takes great pride in doing everything we can to ensure our customers are satisfied with our service.
Like many people, I have numerous email accounts and there are a few that I rarely check – one of those accounts is Gmail. When I checked this account recently, there were several meeting request responses which was very odd since I never schedule meetings with my Gmail account. I uncovered all the “missing” responses.
Every meeting response listed in my Gmail inbox came from a company that was now using Google’s enterprise Gmail service. Gmail somehow switches the meeting creator from my business email address to my Gmail address. I’m trying to get to the root of the problem, but I think the problem stems from the fact my Outlook display name is very similar to my Gmail address. The display name for my business email has a space between my first and last name and my Gmail account has a period. This problem does not occur with normal email, only meeting requests.
While this problem is not a huge deal, it is annoying – unless you’re in sales or business development. I now have to check another email account to determine if some has accepted or declined a meeting.
Is anyone else having this problem or determined the root cause?