Team Scheduling: Round-Robin, Collective, and Routing Forms

When more than one person can take a meeting, StretchSchedule routes bookings for you. This article covers team meeting modes, routing strategies, and routing forms.

Team meeting modes

An event type's mode determines how hosts are involved:

• Round-robin — each booking is assigned to one host from a pool, balancing load across the team. Ideal for a sales or support team sharing incoming demos.
• Collective — a booking is assigned to all the listed hosts, who must every one be available and all attend. Ideal for panels, joint reviews, or interviews.
• Group and one-on-one are single-host modes covered in Creating and Managing Event Types.

Routing strategies

For round-robin event types, choose how the next host is picked. StretchSchedule supports these strategies:

• Round-robin — cycle through hosts in turn so everyone gets a fair share.
• Least-loaded — assign to whoever currently has the fewest bookings, smoothing out uneven weeks.
• Priority — prefer higher-priority hosts first (e.g. senior reps), falling back down the list.
• Collective — everyone is assigned (used with the collective mode).

Set the strategy and the list of routing hosts (by email) on the event type.

Setting up a round-robin event type

1. Create or open an event type and set its mode to round-robin.
2. Add your routing hosts — the team members' emails who can take this meeting.
3. Choose a routing strategy (round-robin, least-loaded, or priority).
4. Make sure each host has availability so the pooled open slots reflect the whole team.
5. Save and share the single link — invitees book once and the app assigns a host.

Previewing routing

Before you commit, you can preview how a strategy behaves. Provide a roster of hosts with their current load and priority and StretchSchedule shows which host a booking would be assigned to under each strategy. This is a safe way to sanity-check that, say, least-loaded really does send the next booking to your quietest rep.

Routing forms: qualify, then route

A routing form adds a short questionnaire in front of scheduling. Instead of every visitor landing on the same page, they answer a few questions and are sent to the right event type based on rules. For example:

• "Are you a new or existing customer?" → new customers go to Sales Demo, existing customers go to Support Session.
• "Company size?" → enterprise leads route to a senior rep's event type.

Each routing form has a title, a set of questions, rules that map answers to a target event type, and a status (active/inactive). Active routing forms qualify and direct incoming requests so the right person and meeting type are always chosen.

A realistic example

A five-person sales team wants incoming demos shared fairly, but enterprise deals should go to the two senior reps:

1. They create a Product Demo event type in round-robin mode with all five reps as routing hosts and a least-loaded strategy.
2. They build a routing form asking "How many employees?" with a rule: 500+ routes to an Enterprise Demo event type whose hosts are only the two senior reps (priority strategy).
3. A small-business lead lands on the demo and is assigned to whichever rep is least loaded; a 2,000-employee lead is routed to a senior rep.

Tips

• Give every host real availability. Round-robin can only offer slots where at least one eligible host is free.
• Use least-loaded to prevent hot spots where one rep gets every booking on busy days.
• Preview before launch so you can see routing behavior without waiting for real traffic.
• Keep routing-form questions to the few that actually change the routing — extra questions slow people down.

FAQ

What's the difference between round-robin and collective? Round-robin assigns one host per booking to balance load; collective assigns all hosts to a single meeting.

Can I override an auto-assigned host? Yes — open the booking and use Assign to hand it to a specific teammate.

Do routing forms create bookings? No — they qualify and direct invitees to the right event type, where the booking is then made.

Troubleshooting

• No slots on a round-robin link. At least one host needs availability at that time; check each host's schedule.
• Bookings all go to one person. Verify the strategy is least-loaded or round-robin (not priority with one host ranked far above the rest) and that every host is in the routing-hosts list.
• A routing form sends everyone to the same place. Review the rules — an overly broad rule or a missing default can funnel all answers to one target.