Scheduling and Appointment Apps - Choosing and Using
I take a quick look at several of the top choices for Online Scheduling.
Schedule Once
http://www.scheduleonce.com/
Calendly
https://calendly.com/
Time Trade
https://www.timetrade.com
Each has issues, but out of about 12 that I looked at, these were the winners.
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About Steve
Steve Dotto is a long time host and executive producer of Dotto Tech, Canada's longest-running technology TV show.
After 15 years on national television, Steve now delivers his advice and how-to videos on YouTube.
Every week we produce one new video which shows how technology fits in your life.
We cover all aspects of technology for my personal use perspective. Concentrating on productivity solutions.
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Closed Caption:
Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you doing
this fine day? Me? I want to make myself far
more available to my community. Actually,
I need to make myself more available to my
community. I have an obligation to people
who are taking a course of mine to be able
to book some time with me for some consultation.
Consequently, I need an online scheduling
solution. So I spent the entire weekend looking
at online tools for booking appointments.
I thought that I would find one that I loved.
I didn’t. I looked at the whole whack of
solutions. I think I went to 12 solutions
in total and I found something wanting in
each and every one of them. There was no one
single perfect solution. I did finally come
up with one that I am happy with, but not
thrilled with, if that makes sense, because
it turns out that all of these online solution
suffer from a little bit je na sais suck.
They all have something that bothers me about
them but they will do the job if you take
some time. So today, we’re going to take
a look at choosing an online scheduling solution
on DottoTech.
Now I was perhaps a little bit overly harsh
because I spent the entire weekend trying
to figure out this solution because I thought
I would find an online scheduling application
that I loved. There are so many tools that
I just really like out there that I really
like the philosophy and the value, all of
those sorts of things and I did not hit on
one that was an absolute homerun. I hit on
one that I think is probably the best overall
solution in my particular case, but they all
left me wanting something more from them.
So to kind of create a frame of reference,
what do we need in an online scheduling application?
First and foremost, we need integration with
our calendar. I use Google Calendar. You might
use Outlook calendar but it has to integrate
because if I create an appointment myself
in my calendar, I want to make sure that that’s
not available to somebody do double-book my
time. That’s number one. Number two is it
would be nice if it was integrated into my
website so I could create a form that people
could fill in on my website that allows people
to book with me without ever leaving my website.
That’s number two. Number three is I would
like them to be able to not just book an appointment
but instead to book just a request for an
appointment so that I can verify whether or
not I’m available or not. Number four, I’d
like it to be a reasonable price. And number
five is it has to be, has to be, has to be
robust. It has to work every time and be reliable.
So that was where my journey began.
Now to give you a little more frame of reference,
there were lots of different services out
there that I dismissed fairly early on just
because of the price. This one here, I love
the name Schedulista. How do you say it? It
looks nice. They’ve got a great looking
website but $20 a month for a single purpose
and they always have less features available
in their single user thing. Suddenly $240
a year, it seems to me to be a lot of money
to spend for something. Now if you are a person
who is a salesperson or you’re booking dozens
and dozens of meetings and it’s all cold
calls and all booking meetings, if you live
that sort of lifestyle or a business style,
then spending more on an application might
well be worth it. But I personally only need
this occasionally as do I imagine the rest
of you is. It’s not something that we use
each and every day but it’s something that
we use as a convenience from time to time.
So consequently, committing to $240 a year
or so for a service that is available elsewhere
for less money, that seems to be a little
bit excessive.
So the three that kind of came down as my
finalists were, in no particular order: ScheduleOnce,
which I looked at before on this channel.
I quite like it. It’s a great product, very
busy website, great product. Number two is
TimeTrade Online Scheduling, probably one
of the bigger players in the space. The third
one was I just really liked this application.
It’s beautiful, simple. It’s called Calendly.
It’s a very nice service that some of my
friends use and I’ve tested it in the past,
quite like.
Each one was missing something. They didn’t
quite do everything for me so there was going
to be a compromise no matter what. The problem
with ScheduleOnce, as far as I was concerned,
came down with the pricing. They have integration
with almost everything, including InfusionSoft
which is nice. But the InfusionSoft integration
came at a very steep price on top of the membership
pricing. So we’re looking at kind of the
basic service at $5 a month. It’s pretty
reasonable. That’s a great price. But most
people are going to want the premium at $10
a month. Then we really look at it, the $20-a-month
plan is really what’s required because here’s
the thing: for the basic one, you get Google
Calendar integration, which is great; you
get booking with approval, which is great.
That means that when somebody goes to schedule
a booking with me, that I can verify it rather
than making a straight-up booking. I love
that and that’s available in the basic package.
So the basic package—I don’t like how
their site pops this stuff up—really works
well from that perspective. But then they
don’t allow automatic booking, Outlook Calendar
integration costs extra and down here website
integration costs extra. So it doesn’t quite
do everything at $5 so we’ve got to go to
the $9-a-month and that doesn’t still do
the website integration. So in order to have
it on my website and not just have a link
that takes them to their website, $20 a month.
It’s getting a little bit rich. If they
had the website integration or some way of
doing it at the $5 a month or even the $10
a month, this one here would probably be the
winner as far as I was concerned. But it’s
not because of those costs.
So we go to Calendly, which is the right price.
Calendly has a wonderful price of $8 and $10
a month. That’s about $100 if you pay in
advance. It does everything we need except
again website integration. There’s no way
to integrate it in a website. You have to
go to their site which I just didn’t like.
I really want to find a solution that will
allow me to stay on our site. Calendly, by
the way, if it’s not a big deal to keep
people on your site, I would take a good hard
look at Calendly. It was one of the nicer
interfaces of all. It does allow you to have
requests for meetings rather than straight
up book meetings. It seems to be a very good
product that a lot of my friends, colleagues
that I work with, quite like.
The one that I chose and the one that I’m
working with right now is TimeTrade. Now TimeTrade
is really a suite of tools. It’s not just
for the individuals and this sort of thing
but it works as well with dental and medical
applications. It’s got for heavy bookings,
for heavy online booking users as well. So
they’ve got a very robust backend for their
system and I should tell you, from my experience,
very good online support because I did have
a little issue and their online support people
were in there very quickly for me. So props
to them for that.
If we take a look at the pricing, it was very
appealing because the basic professional service
which is what I need is $49 a year. So $50
a year, that to me seems to be a reasonable
exchange for what we’re getting. What are
we getting for that? Let me walk you through
what they give. Now as I said, I wasn’t
100% happy because the one thing that I don’t
get from Time Trade is the ability for the
meetings to be a request meeting for me. It’s
a firm booking when it comes to me so that’s
the one thing that I gave up. But I did get
all of the other things that I was looking
for with TimeTrade – nice integration with
Google or Outlook calendar and a good interface
to work with.
So how TimeTrade basically works is we work
based on activities. You create your activities
and in my particular case, what I need this
for is to set up these coaching calls to students
of mine. I’ve got about a hundred students
that need to book some time with me over the
next couple of months. So rather than doing
that manually, an online system is what I’m
going to require. So I set up this screencasting
coaching call as an event and you can go in
and you can tell them, you can give them specifics,
you can ask them questions that they have
to fill-in before they complete their booking
so that you have some background information.
I’ll show you all that when we walked through
the actual booking process.
But the most important thing, as far as we’re
concerned right now, is how you manage your
availability. See, all of these systems have
to do two things. They have to allow you to
create availability on the software side,
telling what you’re available for for different
events. And then on your calendar side, it
has to then work with your calendar to parse
out any events that you already have booked,
anything that would get in the way with one
of your mass bookings that are available on
your side. If you have a dentist appointment
then you don’t want to be available for
consultation at that particular time.
The other thing that a lot of these software
applications will do is tie in to your payment
gateway system. If you’re charging people
for consultation then that’s going to be
another feature that you’re going to want
to have included. Especially ScheduleOnce
has got really nice integration with payment
system but they all will integrate in some
way with your payment system, providing you’re
in one of the mainstream ones such as PayPal
or Stripe or something along that line.
Having said all of that, this is the interface
that you now go into once you’re set up.
You sync it to your calendar, which I won’t
walk you through right now but it’s a straightforward
integration to Google Calendar or to Outlook
Calendar. Once it’s integrate with the calendar
then you go through and you set your kind
of global availability. This is the availability
that I’m giving my students. All that I
do if I want to add some time is I just click
and I drag and that creates an option for
people to be able to book you within that
time. So we’ve got this availability setup.
Once you’ve done that, you click on Finish
and it’s all set up and ready for you to
go.
Now I mentioned that there is website integration
with TimeTrade. It’s not an embed code where
we could actually put the form right in our
website but let me show you what it looks
like. I actually have it already embedded
here because I want to walk you through now
what the person booking go through and then
see how it all interfaces. So this is what
I created here. This is actually the course
page for our screencasting course. Right here
is the widget that I embedded in the website
which interfaces with TimeTrade. This is how
they work as they work with these widgets.
When I click on that, up comes first of all
a welcome message telling people what to expect.
They click on Continue and it then launches
the calendar side of the application, the
booking side of the application.
What it does is it looks first and foremost
at my Google Calendar, determines what availability
I have on the calendar and then it looks at
its own availability that I’ve determined
when I’m available for these accounts or
for these meetings and then it combine those
two to create my availability. So if I wanted
to book something on say Friday morning, the
15th, I could book a 10:30 appointment with
me if I’m the person that’s booking. They
click Continue and then you enter your information—test
info, there it is. Email is info@DottoTech.com.
So you enter all of your information, phone
number and the company information, etc.
These are question which I determined: Please
provide Skype address, YouTube or a web URL.
I ask people to give me this information so
I’m able to then preview their website before
I have the meeting. So you can ask any number
of question here and then have them fill it
in. Once it’s all done, they click Continue.
Once they go over the information, they can
confirm the appointment.
When the appointment’s confirmed then a
whole series of actions happen. First of all,
it’s placed on my Google Calendar, emails
are sent back and forth and confirmations
are made. So here we have the appointments
confirmed. If I go into my Google Calendar
now—there it is right there, test info—there
is all of the information already published
to my Google Calendar, including all of the
information that they created in the fields
when I asked them the questions. So I have
all the background information in this calendar
itself. That’s number one. We’ve created
the calendar appointment and we’re ready
to go.
Now what happens though if I have an appointment
that I want to block off some time myself,
time that is demarked as available? I’m
going to do that. I’m going to just go right
here and right after this here appointment
is over, I’m going to create something new.
I’m going to create the event and I’m
just going to move it down so that it starts
right after. There it is. That should be able
to block off some time on the calendar.
So if we go back, if I sync it, save it to
the web, if I go back now and I start the
whole process over again, I go and I create
a new so I’m another person visiting now,
I should see that I have less availability.
Those two spots should have been taken away.
Yes, indeed. So those spots have been removed
from the inventory available to me. This is
crucial. This is something you have to test
and make sure is working in your system because
you don’t want people double-booking. You
don’t want to end up with customers or with
clients upset with you basically messing up
everybody’s schedule because you’ve trusted
the system and it failed you.
This to me is the heart of a system that has
to be working. The integration with your calendar
has to be flawless and in this particular
case, it’s working quite well. I tested
it. It actually had some issues right at the
beginning but the technical support people
walked me through it. We still don’t know
why it didn’t do it initially quite properly.
It did it for a period of time then it stopped.
I think it was a Google issue. I think it’s
something that you just had to wait a little
bit of time to make it work. But it did allow
me to test out TimeTrade’s customer support
people and they were very quick to get back
to me, which is I think essential for a service
like this that you could end up relying on.
Bottom line is none of these services are
perfect. Find one that works for you, that
fits in your budget and then has the features.
Determine which features are ones that you
absolutely have to have. By the way, the widget
keeps people right within my website environment.
It doesn’t actually embed in my website
where they’re actually at one of my web
pages, which is actually in way better for
me because there are less things to break
but it does sit on top. As soon as they close
it down, they’re still in my website environment.
So it meets most of my criteria.
The only one it didn’t meet was the fact
that I can’t confirm an appointment. Now
what will have to happen is if I have to make
a change, I have to reach back out to the
people. I can do it just through my calendar
interface though and make a change and they
will be notified with that change. So overall,
it’s certainly a worthwhile project to get
going on, to add to your website or to add
to your communications tool kit. But just
be prepared to be somewhat disappointed.
Now I hope that you weren’t disappointed
with this video and that you’ve learned
a lot and the content was valuable. There
are three ways to stay in touch with us here
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a look. There are perks and the perks are
awesome. That is it. As you can tell, I have
a heavy schedule ahead of me. Till next time,
I am Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle.
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