Three Best SaaS Solutions for Scheduling Business Appointments

Three Best SaaS Solutions for Scheduling Business Appointments

Scheduling meetings with potential clients can be a great way to grow your business. Given that most people are now open to a Skype meeting, as opposed to meeting in person for coffee, this alone can expand your small business far beyond what used to be geographically possible.

However, it can quickly get confusing once you have appointments coming in from all over the place, and no way to easily organize them. If youre a power user of your digital calendar this goes double with all those appointments, sorting them manually can become unsustainable.

Have you ever missed an important call or meeting because of some problem with your calendar organization? When this happens its easy to immediately start thinking about all the money you just lost by not attending that meeting.

Theres an app for that!
Luckily theres a plethora of apps to conveniently streamline your appointment booking experience. Here are three of the best:

ScheduleOnce
ScheduleOnce is the first app most people bring up when talking about solutions to manage appointment booking. ScheduleOnce integrates seamlessly with your Google or Outlook calendar, amongst others, so collaboration is easy.

You can begin customizing things right away when you sign up for an account. First youll want to link it to your calendar, so it can add bookings automatically. Then you can specify times and days where youre either available or unavailable. You can also add custom, one-off times and dates, for when something comes up. You can customize the booking page with all sorts of details too, such as adding mandatory fields for things like the purpose of the call and your contacts phone number, so you dont need to go back and forth via email to get those details.

Then you receive a custom link which you can add to your site and send to people, and there are even have widgets you can have pop-up using Javascript. When someone clicks your link, it shows the times youre available in their local time zone. Even if youre both halfway around the world, picking a time to talk that works for both of you couldnt be easier. The appointment is booked to both of your calendars, and you can edit the notification settings to make sure you both remember.

Assistant.to
Assistant.to is a little different to the other apps here in a couple of ways. First of all its completely free, at least for now. But you would expect that in the future Assistant.to will become a paid product, or at the very least, include premium features you need to pay for to utilize.

Assistant.to is far less robust than ScheduleOnce, but what it does, it does really well. It runs within Gmail, meaning its light and wont take up system resources. When youre sending an email where you want to invite someone to a meeting, just click on the plugin at the bottom of the new meeting, and select the purpose of your meeting. Then select the times youre willing to meet, over several days.

The tool will then create a list of those times, right in your email to the other person, and they can click on the time best for them to confirm the meeting. This can work really well if you only want to offer a few times to meet, instead of giving them full access to your available times.

TimeBird
TimeBird is in beta development still, but it should be on your list of apps to watch if youre interested in apps in this space. It integrates with your calendar and the calendars of those youre trying to connect with as well.

It then goes through, sees which times everyone is available for, and suggests the best times in which everyone is available. This works with just two people, or whole groups of people as well.

It makes it much easier to book a meeting when your potential client doesnt have to think about when would be the best time, but instead has one suggested to them. All the more time to dedicate to actual productivity.

No matter which one of these tools you decide to use, gaining a handle on your appointment booking will help you stay better organized, keep your stress levels down, and allow you to walk into every meeting fully prepared.

Dana Lindahl is a writer who specializes in content marketing for startups. His writing helps companies not only reach their customers but also drive sales.

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