How many times have you had what feels like an endless email back-and-forth just to come to the conclusion that a call would have been better? Then, the endless dance of figuring out when works for a call begins. Sometimes it feels like it takes the same amount of time to get something scheduled as it did to decide you needed a call in the first place.
With scheduling links added to your arsenal, you’ll never have to deal with this scenario again. Using a tool to make scheduling easy for you also has the added benefit of making it easy to do so for your clients, colleagues, or anyone else who needs to get a little of your time. Studies have shown that using online scheduling tools boosted key company metrics for health care provides such as no-show rate, decreased staff labor times, decreased waiting time, and improved satisfaction from customers. Whether you work in health care or not, scheduling tools can improve your customer’s experience.
There are a few different use cases that online scheduling is most viable for. In this article, we’ll break down a few specific ones, and how they can best be utilized for your company and team.
Enterprise customers
Some companies choose to offer premium support for higher-paying customers or monetize other offerings, such as phone, customer success or chat, as an extra charge. There’s also the endless parade of calls that happens when trying to sell to a prospective client. Scheduling tools like Appointlet can be incredibly useful in instances like this. Instead of forcing the customer to send an email anytime that they need to schedule, costing both you and them time, you allow them to schedule with you through a smart link that is updated with any of your already-booked time.
Not only is this a better experience for your higher-paying customers, but it also makes them feel more secure in knowing they can reach you at their convenience. Similarly, with a scheduling link, it can be shared amongst multiple users from a specific account. If you only have one point of contact, they can share it with other members of their internal team if someone else needs to speak with you—and you won’t even need an email conversation to get it taken care of.
Specialized Teams
Maybe your company has some specialized teams that occasionally interact with your customers, but not regularly. A good example of this could be an implementation engineer, technical specialist or even your customer success managers. Using an online scheduling tool in chat gives your customer-facing teams a way to offer up specialists’ time without needing to bring them in on a lengthy email chain.
That means that, until the moment they are needed, your specialists can keep focussed on their day-to-day tasks, saving them the energy and effort of context switching to responsibilities outside of their role.
Technical inquiries
There’s a reason that 92% of customers feel satisfied when they are able to talk to a live person, rather than wait for an email response. There are some types of questions that are better answered in person (or over the phone or on video chat). If someone reaches out with a technical question involving any kind of deeper troubleshooting, it can save both you and them time to just hop on a call or into live chat.
Think about it: every minute you spend going back and forth trying to get screenshots, additional details, or credentials to access information is a minute that you could have spent collaboratively working with your customer over video. Many customers don’t have the vocabulary to describe features in your product like you do. Video allows them to show you exactly what they are talking about, rather than fumbling for the right words to describe something that they might not fully understand.
Create a macro for your team to use at the start of technical inquiries that includes a link to your online scheduling tool, and a list of the information that you will need to appropriately troubleshoot their issue. Save yourself the effort of going back and forth trying to diagnose the issue and then get something scheduled by allowing them to schedule when works for them.
Tools like SuperSaaS allow you to connect your booking workflow to external calendars. When the booking is made, your technical team and the customer can both save the date on their Google Calendar to receive notifications and block off the time.
Interviews
If you’ve ever had an interview, then you know that it can be like pulling teeth to get your schedule to fit with the interviewers. Now, imagine being on the other side and trying to balance the schedule of everyone on a panel? Interview links can save a huge amount of time when trying to organize a large number of people at once. Instead of playing calendar tetris, send out a link and let people schedule themselves within a certain timeframe. You can even level up this tactic by including a pre-built video chat link from Appear.in or Zoom to make the whole process even easier.
Using an automation tool like Zapier can ensure that you link all of your scheduling, interviewing and conversation tools together and nothing gets lost in the shuffle ever again.
[Read our Guide to Building a World Class Customer Service Team]
Reduce No-shows
People are busy. Sometimes they don’t see a calendar notification of an event, or forgot to even put anything into their calendar in the first place. In a study done by BookedIn, the amount of no-shows for appointments decreased by 29% after the implementation of online, linked scheduling. Why? Because online scheduling systems include automatic follow-ups and reminders for people leading up to the event. So, even if someone doesn’t get a calendar reminder, they’ll be notified via email, and any other services that they’ve linked to their calendar.
It’s not just about the sunk cost of losing out on the meeting itself, but also on all of the prep time and work that you did. Taking a ton of time preparing for a call, and then context switching to hop into it feels like such a waste when the other person doesn’t show up with no notice. It can take a lot of time to get back into the swing of whatever you were doing prior to the call.
Worse still is trying to figure out another time that works well for any members of the call. With the stream of reminders, anyone who needs to reschedule a meeting can easily do so, making sure to respect both your time and theirs. Similarly, they can reschedule without needing to talk to you about when works or doesn’t work.
Conclusion
Why spend a bunch of your time scheduling calendar invites when you could let it take care of itself? Sending out links to your customers, interviewees and prospects allows them to schedule appointments on their own time. That makes a better experience for both you and them. Use scheduling links during the interview process, when you’re trying to get a new potential customer up to speed, or even when you’re helping an existing customer out with an issue that they are having.
Spend your time and your customers’ energy doing the things that you both want to do, rather than getting stuck in the tedium of scheduling. Create personalized scheduling links for everyone on your team and include them in email signatures and chat macros to make the most of your tooling! Then, go find something new to do with all the extra time you’ll be saving.
About the author: Sarah Chambers is Editor-in-Chief for Chatra, a messaging tool for small businesses. She also runs Supported Content, a boutique marketing agency for customer service businesses. When she’s not furiously typing away, she’s climbing, knitting or snowboarding in the mountains of Western Canada.