The digital age has given us many excellent tools that we can use in business to make life easier. With communication now being entirely digital, it is no surprise that handheld devices are a necessity in all areas of industry and commerce. This has been even more prevalent in the last year with enforced remote working being the norm for many businesses.
One of the areas in which business tools have provided excellent help is that of appointment scheduling and meeting planners. What do you look for in a good appointment management tool? We had a look at the market and believe we’ve found the five most used features that this sort of app or tool provides, so let’s have a look at them.
The Top 5 Features
The market may be a growing one, but you can rest assured there will be an appointment scheduler tool that suits your requirements, and it will also involve the following five essential features.
Appointment Calendar
The calendar will be the central hub of any scheduling tool and will be interactive. Add an appointment in the diary and it will automatically be put on the calendar which can be browsed to check upcoming events, appointments, and meetings. The calendar will also be optimized for smartphone use so is an essential tool for agents or reps on the move.
Look for a calendar that can be viewed in a day, week, and month mode for most efficient use.
Booking Links
Allowing clients or potential clients to book an appointment by using a link is an efficient way of getting things done. It’s also the most effective method of allowing attendees at meetings or events to confirm their attendance. You will be updated constantly and able to control the situation and know in advance who is going to be where and when.
Email Reminders
A quality scheduling app will automatically send email reminders to those who have appointments or bookings, so nobody misses a meeting. This will be done as part of the calendar and booking feature so you will not need to think about it.
Responses will notify you of those who reply and any changes that you might have to make, making this a supremely efficient function that is of great help for small to larger businesses.
Group Appointments
If you need to book many people in at once you can send out multiple group appointments with better scheduling tools, saving a lot of time and effort on planning group meetings. This can be for physical or virtual meetings, events, and other occasions. The contacts can respond directly so you can ensure you have the right location and facilities booked for the right time.
Current solutions only allow one person scheduling at the time but it is hard to coordinate times for multiple employees across different time zones. Group appointments allow you to combine multiple people’s availability in one booking form that shows everyone’s availability at the same time.
Video Conferencing
Perhaps the most impressive and useful things about an appointment scheduler app is when it adds video conferencing. This has been a much-in-demand feature in the last year and more thanks to the necessity of remote working across much of commerce and industry. Video conferencing allows for parties of numerous people to talk face to face in real-time, thus bringing meetings into the digital world for the first time.
The above five features will be found on any scheduling tool and each has major benefits in terms of increasing productivity and reducing costs. Easy to use, such a tool will soon become part of daily life once you start to use it and will make life a lot easier for all the team. Have a look at those available now and you will soon find one that is perfect for your business.
Interesting Related Article: “Benefits of Using Employee Scheduling Software“