Automate the back-and-forth of scheduling with these appointment booking tools.
Emily Triplett Lentz
Jan 21, 2022
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How much time do you spend every day overseeing your work calendar? It takes time to manage client bookings, schedule meetings with contacts, deal with last-minute customer cancellations, and reschedule appointments on request.
Too often, these must-do tasks overwhelm your day and waste valuable time. Ultimately, they limit your ability to bring in new business, meet with additional people, and earn more money.
You can take back control of your calendar with a little help from booking software. Today’s online tools for booking appointments automate it all — but the benefits aren’t just for business owners. Clients will love the ease and convenience of being able to make their appointments online whenever they want, too.
You could stick with an old-fashioned paper schedule book, but online appointment scheduling makes for a more user-friendly customer experience and saves you an incredible amount of time.
Each booking app is different, but they all provide an online portal where your customers, prospects, contacts, patients, students, and others can schedule a meeting with you or another member of your staff.
These tools allow you to set and routinely adjust your own parameters for available appointment times, staff, and services. In most cases, you can even process online payments through your booking system of choice.
Successful and efficient companies of all sizes and shapes take advantage of appointment booking tools simply because they save time and money.
Small businesses and entrepreneurs use scheduling software to book important meetings and client appointments.
Recruiters use them to set up and keep track of prospective employee interviews.
Educators and teachers use them to manage student conferences, online classes, and office hours with the touch of a button.
Sales and marketing professionals instantly book calls with prospects so they never lose a hot lead.
Customer success managers arrange their check-ins with friendly online apps they can use wherever they go.
All service providers offer their own functionality, but the best ones include a combination of the following features:
To find the tool that’s right for your business, here are some good questions to ask:
You likely have specific needs when booking appointments, so it’s important to find the right tool with the right set of features. Here are 13 of the best.
Calendly is one of the easiest online schedulers to use. Simply connect your calendar(s), create your scheduling rules, and share the link to your booking page, and clients can start setting up their appointments. They’ll only see the times you’re available, and only the length and type of meeting you want to have. Because Calendly Workflows automate administrative tasks like sending reminder emails and follow-ups, you can focus on the work that builds your business and brings customers back for more.
There’s no more back-and-forth for you or your client. Your schedule fills up efficiently, and everyone avoids excess email exchanges.
Calendly offers a simple, affordable way for individual professionals —such as recruiters, teachers, salespeople, customer support professionals, and entrepreneurs — to book appointments. As your business grows, you can easily expand its use to an entire team, department, or company.
Calendly works for scheduling one-on-one meetings and identifying collective availability . It also adjusts for users’ different time zones, so all meeting participants arrive on time.
For teams, Calendly also offers Round Robin scheduling , where clients are matched with the first available team member. Calendly Routing lets you match clients with the right team member’s scheduling page based on info in their booking form, like language, location, or what they need help with.
Calendly works with major calendars across devices, including Microsoft Office 365 and Google Calendar . Integrations with video conferencing tools like Zoom , CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot , and hundreds of others make it easy to pair with the tools you already use and love. Mobile apps for iOS and Android and browser extensions let users manage scheduling anytime, anywhere.
Stripe and PayPal integrations enable your clients to submit payment as soon as they schedule a meeting. You get paid on time, every time, without dealing with bills or invoices.
Calendly makes scheduling easier and faster for you and your clients by:
Calendly has four pricing tiers . The prices below apply to accounts with annual billing, which can save you up to 20% per user per month.
Calendly’s free trial gives you access to all Teams features for 14 days. Afterward, you can subscribe to any of the paid plans or default to the free plan.
