Whether you run recurring webinars in Seattle, Washington, a nail salon in Duluth, Minnesota, handling sales for an organization, or a barber shop in Atlanta, Georgia, scheduling appointments remains the core of your business.
Despite this fact, many businesses continue to use emails and phone calls or something even more prehistoric to handle the most important aspect of their operations.
“Businesses continue to rely on pen and paper to jot down details and schedule meetings, which really doesn’t help in scaling up,” says Surekha Jagadish, head of Marketing for Zoho Bookings.
Zoho’s automated scheduling software offers a way to cut down on no-shows and integrate other software for payments, marketing, customer experience and more.
But first, take a look at the alternatives.
Scheduling Alternatives and Bottlenecks
Writing down appointments on registers when customers stop by or call on the phone, seems easy enough.
But this system requires you to dedicate a manager or receptionist to those duties.
Or you need to ask employees to take out time to manage appointments, the time they should be using to serve customers.
Consider our barber shop and nail salon examples.Imagine leaving someone with shaving cream all over their face or only one hand pedicured to go and deal with scheduling issues.
The alternative involves leaving the customer who wants to schedule the appointment in a limbo while you finish with your current customer.
Either choice divides your staff’s and your own attention.
But even options like email or chat platforms like Whatsapp fall short.
Consider when customers ask for appointments via emails or chat platforms, someone must take time to corral all those incoming requests.
Surekha points out how all these scheduling systems:
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Leave your prospects without a clear response about whether the appointment is scheduled or not.
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Fail to capitalize on the moment your prospects are most motivated to schedule an appointment with your business.
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Lead to additional complications when prospects need to cancel or reschedule an appointment.
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Lead to prospect frustration because of lack of a prompt response.
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Lead to additional work for you and your staff.
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Limit your appointment scheduling to business hours even though this may not be the period of peak customer interest.
“These are all the challenges that come even when they use normal email, your WhatsAppor any chat platform to schedule appointments,” says Surekha
“Because there is a lot of communication happening back and forth, and figuring out who’s available and who’s not.”
How Zoho Bookings Addresses These Pain Points
Fortunately, Zoho’s software engineers devised a solution to all these problems – plus some you may not have even considered.
Visit Zoho Bookings for a view of how scheduling should be.
Once you embed the booking page on your website, prospects use the intuitive dashboard above to schedule, reschedule or cancel their own appointments. Consider the problems this solves.
Scheduling now takes up next to none of your staff’s time. Forget sending confirmation emails or returning phone calls to confirm appointments.
Most importantly, prospects now schedule appointments when they are most motivated – perhaps immediately upon seeing a marketing message. And that happens even if your staff has already closed up shop for the day and gone home to be with their families.
Prospects see their appointments have been scheduled. And when you and your staff check the next day, you know it too.
But the tool offers much more than a simple online calendar and appointment scheduling platform.
Zoho calls Bookings its end to end appointment scheduling software. This comes from the fact that Zoho Bookings handles the process from the time a prospect enters your business through the time services are delivered. And, this process extends to helping understand what the customer thought of your service and how they can be made a return customer.
To accomplish all this, Zoho Bookings interacts with payment providers, CRMs and other solutions both inside and outside Zoho, where necessary.
But first, take a look at how Zoho Bookings works – and how this helps a wide variety of businesses with their scheduling needs.
Zoho Bookings: An Overview
To begin with, Zoho Bookings offers a simple and intuitive way to set up your scheduling for various services and prompts you to add details specific to your business.
First, fill in the required details in the screen below.
You begin by adding your business name and website. You also add the preferred currency for your business.
Then move on to a page where you will be asked for relevant details about your company.
All the while, a progress bar shows the number of tasks you’ve completed – and those still needing completion to fully set up and get you meeting ready.
The above page asks for the industry that best describes your business.
Select from a variety of options including HR, sales, marketing, finance, and more.
Then select the specific customer needs you will be addressing with your services. This is AI-generated based on the industry you select.
For example, suppose you run a software as a service solution. You need to set up appointments to walk clients through account setup. You might select “customer support” and then “technical support” as shown above.
On the other hand, if you offer personalized Zumba training and want to use Zoho Bookings to set up one-on-one tutorials, you might choose “fitness” and then “personalized service.”
Cool, huh?
Now, look how Zoho Bookings helps you set up your availability. This allows customers and clients to pick times that work best for them.
In the screen above, first set your time zone. For instance, if your business calls the U.S home, you might set the time zone to Eastern Standard Time for New York City or Pacific Standard Time for San Francisco.
Next set hours and days of availability. Do you and your staff limit availability to weekdays and standard office hours – say 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.?
Or do you offer some availability to customers or clients after hours or on weekends?
Whatever the case, Zoho Bookings allows you to effortlessly plug in your availability, allowing customers to simply choose a day and time that works for them.
“So once the app is set up, we would create a one-on-one service relevant to the industry they choose so they can book a sample appointment and get started,” explains Yogesh S., Senior Product Manager for Zoho Bookings.
Types of Booking Services
In addition to setting the business availability , Zoho Bookings also permits you to offer various types of meetings to customers or clients.
This allows you to further customize your appointment options based on your business needs.
One-On-One
First, Zoho Bookings offers One-On-One meetings.
“The one-on-one meeting is the most widely used while schedulingmeetings,” Yogesh S. explains.
This session allows a single host to meet with one participant virtually or in person.
Consider again our Atlanta barber shop. Use the setup screens above to establish your regular hours. Customers access the application and set appointments based on your availability.
Imagine other virtual and in person uses for the app. A local podiatrist offers patients a simple way to set up appointments, for example. Or a life coach presents the opportunity to set up virtual consultations.
Group Booking
The group booking feature allows a single host to offer multiple clients or customers the opportunity to sign up for a class or other group interaction.
Remember our Seattle-based webinar presenter? Use Zoho Bookings to set up times when you will be available to present your webinars, that are scheduled repetitively. Interested participants then use the application to choose and schedule a time that fits their availability too.
If you’re a university department head, think about the options of using group booking to set up – say – online Spanish or math classes for the summer semester.
Collective Booking
“The collective booking is the reverse of group booking,” Yogesh S. says.
Here, Zoho Booking offers the option of multiple hosts and a single participant or customer.
Think about how this booking option might work when setting up panel interviews for screening job applicants. Or use it to set up a board meeting or similar group discussion.
Consider this option also when your sales team needs to meet with a customer or client for a product demo or other sales call.
Resource
This last option offers a simplified method of booking anything from conference rooms to equipment rental, says Zoho.
Use the resource booking feature to schedule use of offices or meeting rooms at your coworking space.
Or automate the scheduling of space at businesses and organizations ranging from bars to churches to banquet halls for special events.
Other Features
Of course, Zoho Bookings offers many other features as well.
For example, on the Zoho Bookings landing page above, you see how businesses can create various services. Customers visiting your landing page schedule appointments based on the type of service they want.
In the case of the hypothetical sales organization above, we see clients initially have the opportunity to schedule discovery calls where sales people learn about their needs.
Another option involves a more general sales meeting.
Switching to the healthcare sector, imagine a family medical practice offering appointments for complete physicals, wellness visits or follow-up visits, for instance.
Above, Zoho Bookings also offers several methods of sharing links to its appointment page with clients and customers.
Consulting businesses, as one example, routinely send emails to their lists. Zoho Bookings offers the opportunity for them to add a link for prospects to click through and sign up for a one-time consulting session.
But the software also offers another choice. Whether you are promoting your services as a periodontist or a web designer, simply allow patients or clients to book appointments through an embedded widget on your site.
The company also offers a white label option so that your scheduling page need not look like it comes from a separate provider. The customizable booking page allows you to incorporate your own branding elements so that your customers recieve a seamless experience. AI integration helps match your embedded scheduling widget with your site’s overall appearance and branding.
Zoho says more options for getting clients to the booking page are on the way.
The software also offers email, SMS and calendar invite notifications. These remind your customer or client of upcoming appointments and hopefully reduce the incidence of no-shows.
Zoho Bookings also offers interaction with a raft of other services both native and from other providers. For example, the software integrates with Zoho Calendar, Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar.
Integration with Zoho Meeting, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Zoom offer flexibility when setting up online meetings.
The software also integrates with payment and CRM options.
These services allow you to take payments for virtual appointments and to send followup email marketing in the hopes of turning clients who book a call into repeat customers, for example.
A few interesting Zoho Bookings’ features, are an in-built calendar that can showcase staff availability across days and weeks. Businesses can pick and choose the timeslot they want to share with specific customers, with the ability to copy and paste these timeslots across all email providers. Staff will also be able to send notifications and reminders via WhatsApp to their clients, shortly.
Zoho prices its Bookings service at $6 per user per month for its basic package and $9 per user per month for companies with up to three locations or departments. Additional workspaces for more teams or locations can be paid for as add ons. And Zoho offers custom plans based on a business’s specific needs.
Final Thoughts
With 14 million appointments already scheduled, Zoho Bookings enjoys the trust of 29,000 plus customers thus far, the company says.
Large concentrations of these clients inhabit the healthcare and education sectors as well as real estate. But the software lends itself to businesses of all kinds. Since Zoho created Bookings to accommodate the needs of healthcare businesses as well, they also made the software HIPAA compliant.
Among companies proudly relying on Bookings, Zoho counts Spaghetti Agency, a UK digital marketing firm.
Prior to using Zoho Bookings, Spaghetti Agency complained of too much back and forth with clients delaying the scheduling of calls.
After adopting Bookings, the company reports saved time scheduling thanks to customers being able to see real-time availability while setting up appointments.
Whether you operate a medical office in Poughkeepsie, New York, an online sales team In Toronto, Ontario or a beauty salon in Detroit, Michigan, you need scheduling software that works for you.
Stop wasting time taking calls by phone or email. Adopt a booking application you can customize to fit your business.
Learn more about Zoho Bookings and the whole Zoho ecosystem today.
This article, "Schedule For Success with Zoho Bookings" was first published on Small Business Trends
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