Running a successful business requires scheduling plans with clarity. Doing so will make collaborative work easier to organise, among others. Discover the tool that’ll make scheduling easier.
Scheduling your plans is a must in any business.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person team or you work with hundreds of employees. You need a proper system to schedule all your tasks effectively.
Why?
When your schedule is aligned with everyone else, you get to collaborate efficiently with each other. You also avoid miscommunication that can lead to wasted time and resources. As a result, you’ll get to keep your costs low while being able to accomplish all your goals.
But to make this work, you have to monitor everyone’s schedules. They should be in sync so no one will miss important meetings and collaborative work.
As you know, doing that manually will take a lot of time and effort. So, to make things easier, you should get a software program that’ll allow you to manage your and your teams’ schedules.
Something like Calendly.
With it, you can sync schedules with everyone involved in the business – even third-party companies and suppliers. You can also set client meetings with ease.
This means you’ll no longer have to worry about appointments clashing with the multiple tasks that you have to do.
What is Calendly?
This is software that manages your scheduled appointments online.
Since it’s automated, you can simply input the details of your schedule. Then, Calendly will sync it with all the other calendars you use – like your Apple, Outlook, or Google Calendar. This ensures that people can book time with you without you having to deal with double bookings.
Calendly is not just an app. It’s a platform that can manage all your calendars.
It has a lot of incredible features that can help everyone in your business stay productive. And it’ll also allow people to collaborate with each other without having to deal with conflicting schedules.
With that in mind, here are seven of Calendly’s key features that your business can benefit from:
Feature 1: Calendar Integration
Every single business app and platform these days seems to offer its own calendar features, from the Apple calendar on your mobile to the one provided by Outlook or Google on its browser. And if you tend to use them all, it’s very easy for your schedule to get mixed up.
What do I mean?
For example, let’s say you set a client meeting on Monday on your Apple calendar. And your team is unaware of that client meeting, so they ended up booking a meeting with you through your team’s Google calendar for that same time.
If both calendars aren’t integrated, that means you’re double-booked for the day.
Fortunately, Calendly can help you avoid this scenario. It has the Calendar Connection feature that integrates all your calendar apps into one platform so people can see your availability, regardless of which app you use.
Feature 2: Synced Schedules
With all your personal and business calendars integrated through Calendly, you won’t have to worry about double bookings. The great thing is that this works both ways. This means you can also sync your schedule with that of your team.
Simply put, you can set a meeting and it’ll immediately be synced to the calendars of the people involved in the event. Calendly even considers the time zones of the people you need to connect with.
Every booked schedule gets updated in synced calendars in real time. That way, people involved get alerted of it immediately.
Now, if privacy is a concern, you don’t need to worry. Your schedules may be synced but Calendly will just show your availability on a particular date and time. Other people won’t see the details of your booked engagements on your calendar.
This means you can put in personal events like birthdays, anniversaries, and other holidays and people won’t be privy to what that blocked schedule is.
Feature 3: Pooled Availability Options
Have you ever tried setting a meeting but found it difficult to get people to agree to a specific date and time?
This is another area where Calendly can help. It allows you to see pooled availability, which means it becomes easier to find out when everyone else is free and set a time for an event.
As a result, you no longer have to keep going back and forth with everyone through email to find a common time for a meeting, which is a huge drain on your time and energy.
Feature 4: Automated Notifications
Another great feature of Calendly is the automated notifications. Alerts can be sent through email and SMS so you’re sure they won’t be missed.
Calendly won’t only alert people of meetings or events that you’ve set but also notify them if the said event is already upcoming.
These reminders will make sure nobody misses a meeting or event ever again. It’ll also help people adequately prepare for what’ll be discussed.
Feature 5: Event Organisation
Calendly allows you to set meetings with detailed descriptions of the event. For instance, you can indicate that an event is a group event or a one-on-one meeting.
You can then assign colours to every event so you can easily see how many group meetings you have or how many of your scheduled events involve your clients or your team.
If you have other types of events like webinars, workshops, or conferences, you can assign different colours to them as well. This way, you get to identify what your schedule will be like for the week, even at a glance.
Feature 6: Website Bookings
Admittedly, Calendly can’t be fully integrated into WordPress. But you can embed it on your website so your clients can easily schedule a meeting with you or your team.
But for this to work, you have to make sure your website is usually the right template.
Also, keep in mind that if you choose to do an inline embedding so Calendly will appear on every page, you have to be careful. One wrong move could compromise the whole website.
Another option is to use a custom HTML block. But this can be tedious because you have to do it on every page of your website.
But if you can set things up right, it can increase your conversion rate and bring in more clients.
Given the complicated process, it’s best to leave a professional to do this – like one of our Automation Agency Heroes. We’re trained to embed Calendly onto websites without negatively affecting them.
Feature 7: Analytics Feature
This is a new feature that allows you to look at the data analytics of schedules and use it to drive better outcomes for your business.
For example, if you set events like webinars and classes for your clients, Calendly can provide you with data trends that’ll tell you which ones were successful and which ones weren’t. You can then plan your future events better to ensure they’ll be productive and highly efficient.
You can also see the day-to-day availability of your team, including their vacation leaves, so you can plan ahead.
And if you have a sales team, you can monitor how many client meetings they’ve booked at a certain period. This will give you insight into who’s more productive and who might need some assistance.
Of course, Calendly has more features that aren’t stated on this list. Just know that all these features can bring incredible benefits to your business.
Benefits of Using Calendly
What’s great about Calendly is it can improve different areas of your business no matter what industry you’re operating in. You’ll find this scheduling platform to be flexible enough to provide benefits in various areas, such as:
Area #1. Sales and Marketing
Scheduling can be overwhelming. But thanks to Calendly, it’ll be easier. And there’s no need to worry that client calls and meetings will be left unnoticed.
Also, if you can embed Calendly on your website, you’ll be making it easy for clients to book meetings with your team. You also can ensure that there’ll be no disappointing instances wherein a client gets double booked or accidentally cancelled.
And since your sales team won’t have to go back and forth with a client just to set up a meeting with them, the sales cycle will happen faster, which can eventually lead to more closed deals for your business.
Needless to say, you can use Calendly as a conversion tool that can give you a competitive advantage in the market.
Area #2. Customer Support
With Calendly helping you keep schedules organised, you won’t have to miss any of your clients’ meetings or calls.
It’ll then make them feel like you’re personally attending to their needs. As such, they’ll feel grateful for the attention you’re seemingly providing them as they go through the whole sales process – and even beyond it.
This then makes it easier for you to create long-lasting relationships with them.
Area #3. Talent Recruitment
Hiring the right team for your business is essential. And with Calendly, you can make the recruitment process more efficient.
For starters, you can use it to easily book interviews so no one will end up wasting their time on long waits.
You can also set up an effective onboarding schedule with Calendly. Use it to arrange your calendars in a way that they’ll be trained and introduced to every part of your business. This will ensure that your new recruits will settle in perfectly with the rest of the team.
Area #4. Digitisation and Cyber Security
Calendly takes cyber security seriously. That’s why you can rest assured that your schedules and appointments will remain private and secure on the platform.
What’s more, it lets you control who has access to important data by setting up permissions across the platform. You can even monitor how your team uses Calendly. This will help you track security breaches and minimise data leaks in the company.
Area #5. Training and Education
If your business offers classes, webinars, or online courses, Calendly can help you keep all the schedules organised. Everyone involved in the event can get notified of any updates automatically. And that means nobody will miss the schedules you’ve set.
Since Calendly can deal with everything that revolves around scheduling, that’ll help you focus more on your event and give your clients your full attention.
What’s more, any training program that you have for your team can also be added to your schedules via the Calendly platform. This may seem like a small step but it’ll help you build a better team that can bring your business to the next level.
Make Organising Your Schedule a Lot Easier
Planning everyone’s schedules in your business seems like a trivial thing. But the truth is, it matters a lot.
When you have unorganised schedules, missing team and client meetings and leaving clients unattended, among others, can happen more often than not. And as you know, these things can create significant damage to your business.
It’s time to make sure that your and your team’s schedules are well-organised. And one of the best ways to do that is to set up Calendly for you and your team.
Remember, the more aligned everyone is with the daily tasks, the more productive everyone can be. And you can minimise mistakes that’ll drain precious time and resources.
If you need help setting up Calendly in your business and website, call our Concierge Service. We have Automation Agency Heroes who are trained and experienced in setting up Calendly, and they can make your business operations run smoothly with it.