If you’re booking appointments with customers or clients, the back and forth of finding a suitable time can seem to take longer than the appointment itself! A new solution, called ‘Calendly’ may help you solve that problem…

Transcript:

Hi and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

In this episode I wanted to talk to you about a piece of software that attaches to your calendar and enables your customers or clients to book appointments with you and it’s called Calendly.

It’s gaining popularity because it does make life a lot easier for you and for your clients or customers. The reason being it stops that back and forth of trying to work out which dates work for all the parties involved.

You can set up Calendly so that you end up with a link to put in your email footer. You can add it to your website and obviously you can then just send it out to clients or customers if they’re trying to arrange an appointment and say, just book onto my diary, here’s all my availability.

So it just does save that back and forth all the time.

How much does it cost?

Calendly is really affordable. There’s a free option and a second tier which gives you unlimited appointments and different types of appointments which is $8 per user per month. So it’s really not that much money and if you’re booking lots of appointments it can make life a lot easier for you.

It’s flexible too!

I mentioned different appointment types and essentially if you are using the $8 a month option you can set up as many types of different appointments as you might like to.

That could be for example, a five minute telephone call, a 15 minute telephone call, a half hour Skype or Zoom call. It could be an hour’s face to face meeting or a two hour introductory meeting. And you can then specify within those appointment types different pieces of information that you want your booking person to give to you. It could be what venue do you prefer, it could be what do you want to discuss, what information do you want and that sort of thing so that you’re pre-prepared.

The other beauty of Calendly is that you can specify and say, right within this appointment type, so for example an hour’s telephone call or an hour’s online meeting, I want to have a buffer at the end of it of 30 minutes because I know that I’m going to have information that I need to action coming from that and I want to allow myself that time to do it.

You can also say that you don’t want to be surprised by bookings so you can specify that nothing can be booked within 24 or 48 hours, so you’re always looking at least that far in advance. It does mean that if somebody’s got an urgent requirement they may think, well I can’t call, as you can’t deal with it, so you need to make sure that you overcome that potential reluctance but it does mean that you’re not going to suddenly look at your diary and think oh goodness, I’ve got something booked in 10 minutes time.

We’re looking at implementing it because we think it would be a really useful way of people being able to book a time with us very easily. The downside of it for us is that we actually really like to talk to people, so actually investing that time in the back and forth means that we get the opportunity to speak to them or at least email and have a conversation. Whether we implement it or not though, and we’re not entirely sure as yet, I do think if you do book a lot of calls or a lot of appointments it’s certainly worth looking at.

So that’s Calendly!

As I say, it’s very affordable; there are different price brackets but do have a look at their website because they have a 14 day free trial that gives you the opportunity to have a play and get it attached to your calendar.

So good luck and let me know how you get on, and I’ll see you all very soon.