Scheduling Meetings Should Be Easy – is it?

It should be a simple process if you have a business that depends on scheduling meetings with clients, colleagues, suppliers, and contractors. Your business isn’t “meeting scheduling”, so it shouldn’t take a lot of your time or energy.

Your clients would say the same. If they think, “I want this service.” they don’t want to have to wait around for responses or wait until working hours to make a phone call or go to a physical location. Some people just don’t have that option.

Fact: Scheduling meetings should be Simple, Quick and Accessible.

Making Scheduling Meetings Easy – Use a Meeting Scheduler

Suppose you’re not using a meeting scheduler for a business that relies on scheduling meetings and appointments. In that case, you are probably wasting a lot of human resources hours on something that you could automate. 

How long does it take a person to check multiple calendars for availability and then send a proposed meeting time for the client? The fact is that it’s a lot longer than it takes software. And then there is the possibility that the client can’t make that time or date, which is when the whole back and forth email chain begins.

That way of doing things is not efficient. Some people argue for the “personal touch” with their clients, but unless you are wasting a whole lot of your time making appointments, that personal touch is lost anyway. Using a meeting scheduler means less time is wasted for you and your clients.

Efficiency is Crucial for Businesses Scheduling Meetings

What’s more profitable, using your time for billable services and consultations or manually making appointments with clients? I think you know the answer.

Even in a well-established business environment, employing someone to manage appointment bookings and scheduling meetings is a waste of resources. It’s not efficient or cost-effective, and efficiency and cost management are crucial when keeping your prices competitive. More to the point, your team members (or even just you) will be far more productive if you can eliminate meeting scheduling from the things you have to do.

From another perspective, it’s not just the act of scheduling meetings that will benefit from automating the process. Your business reporting will also benefit from the data your meeting scheduler collects.

I’m not talking about anything that would cause problems with privacy laws. However, you can discover when people tend to schedule meetings with you, the most frequently scheduled meeting types, your busiest periods, and so on. Manually setting appointments in a calendar will not give you this valuable data.

Again this is another business efficiency that saves time for your teams and gives extra data-based benefits.

Convenience is Key for Clients Scheduling Meetings

What’s more convenient? Four or five clicks on a meeting scheduler’s booking page, or waiting for someone on the other end of a phone call or email to tell you what you want to know and when you can have an appointment?

Convenience is more than the speed of booking a meeting time. It’s also about when and how you can schedule an appointment. Despite the relatively new concept of people working four-day weeks or flexible hours, there is still a vast block of time during the day when people are working, looking after their children or doing errands and chores.

If you don’t have the time to call and wait for responses during the day, it’s far simpler to go to a booking page. You can check the available times and make and schedule a meeting for a time that suits you. You can probably do it from a smartphone while waiting in the deli queue or riding public transport to or from work.

That’s it! All done, and the meeting you had to schedule was done within seconds. No coming back to it to chase a response or get them to change the time because the one they suggested didn’t fit for you. And no waiting on a call because the other end has to check multiple calendars for availability.

How does SimplyMeet.me fulfil your scheduling needs?

I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of just how well SimplyMeet.me can fulfil your needs as a simple, convenient and efficient meeting scheduler. I will highlight just how SimplyMeet.me fits those three requirements of scheduling meetings.

• Simple
• Efficient
• Accessible

Simple

Simplicity is the byword for setting up your booking page for your different meeting types. You can setup up to eight calendars to check against your meeting availability. So you can check for your availability, those of your colleagues, meeting rooms equipment and whatever else you need for your meetings. With this in place, a client needs only to check the appointment they need, and the system will show availability based on all parties’ calendars.

For clients and colleagues, the system is equally as simple. With four clicks and their essential data input, your client can confirm a scheduled meeting. It takes less than a minute.

• One Click: Meeting Type
• Two Click: Date
• Three Click: Time
  • Complete essential details: Name, email, phone (optional)
• Four: Schedule Meeting 

It can take longer to input a phone number and wait for someone to answer.

Efficient

Secure bookings, confirm availability, collect client data, report on meeting patterns, and manage team workloads, all without using staff hours.

How’s that for efficiency?

Accessible

When clients have to make special arrangements to schedule a meeting, they are at the mercy of gatekeepers. These gatekeepers might not be actual people, but the receptionist they call and try to arrange a meeting time that works for them is a gatekeeper. They are the ones who will tell a client when they can schedule a meeting and possibly go back and forth until a suitable time and date are established. The time of day that a client has to call and the contact methods are also gatekeepers of a client’s ability to schedule meetings.

Accessibility puts the power and autonomy in the client’s hands. When they are free to access your booking page to make their own meeting appointment, it takes mere seconds. If they have to jump through hoops, it takes much longer.

So if scheduling meetings with you should be easy, is it?