Businesses need scheduling apps to book appointments, plan meetings and better organize the time of their team members. This type of software should enable you to boost the productivity of your staff, increase customer satisfaction and ultimately maximize your revenue. Learn about the advantages of such solutions and the reasons why they come in handy for companies from any industry.
Best Appointment Scheduling Apps
It's much more convenient to use scheduling apps rather than bounce emails with appointment details back and forth. When it comes to planning meetings, emails are a productivity killer and you risk losing precious information too often. Plus, the recipients might fail to open your messages or reply to you. Scheduling apps enable you to automate the planning and booking process, saving the time and effort of all the participants.
Schedule Planning Benefits
Businesses love scheduling apps because such software allows them to achieve the following goals:
Scheduling apps can synchronize with your calendar and decrease the amount of administrative tasks that you need to complete.
Free Scheduling Apps
Please mind that most of the products listed below have free and premium versions. Depending on the size and needs of your business, you might be satisfied with the free ones. Premium variants usually offer wider functionality and accommodate a larger number of users.
Bitrix24
This solution stands out among all most scheduling apps because it's a powerful and versatile product whose functionality goes far beyond planning meetings. It features product and project management tools, an in-built contact center, a top-end CRM and many other elements. Bitrix24 is indispensable for scheduling for the following reasons:
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You can create as many calendars as you need
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The system allows you to customize each calendar with color coding
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Calendars can be viewed either individually or simultaneously
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You can modify access rights for each department or team member
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Your staff members will be able to collaborate on calendars
You can create notifications to remind your clients about appointments. Whenever you make a booking for a certain person, Bitrix24 will immediately send a notification email to them. If you decide to remind this person about the appointment later, you can write to them or call them right from the system's dashboard — and the CRM will store the information about the call.
Bitrix24 is ideal for both external and internal appointment planning. You can easily set recurring events here, such as weekly or monthly meetings of your department. This product integrates with many popular third-party solutions. Plus, it can generate insightful reports that will help you to estimate your team's productivity.
Appointlet
Here, you can make booking pages, send them to your clients and integrate them into your emails, landing pages and your company's site. The number of form fields, meeting types and bookings is unlimited.
Appointy
This app can not only schedule appointments but also manage occupancy. During the pandemic, it will be easy for you to track how your company meets social distancing requirements with every event.
Arrangr
It should take you less than 30 seconds to book an appointment in this app. This product integrates with HubSpot and facilitates the process of finding the optimal time and place for a meeting.
Calendar
This one belongs to the category of AI-powered scheduling apps. It also doubles as a time management instrument and features a virtual assistant. You'll be able to sync the app across multiple devices and access the information from Outlook Calendar, iCal and Google Calendar through a unified dashboard. If you wish to get access to analytical tools and meeting transcription opportunities, you should upgrade to a paid plan.
CalendarHero
At first sight, it might seem that its functionality is rather basic. You can benefit from internal group scheduling and create scheduling links. The primary competitive edge of this product is the opportunity to establish powerful connections with your tech stack and its notification system. Also, you'll always meet your appointment deadlines thanks to smart time settings for meeting buffers.
Calendly
You can do the following at no cost:
In the premium version, you'll be able to get insightful reports and use administrative tools to manage your appointments. Plus, you'll be able to choose from diverse meeting types.
Chili Piper
It's a meeting lifecycle automation platform that breaks the stereotypes. It makes the process of scheduling via email simple and efficient. At the end of each email, you can place buttons that will allow the recipient to book an appointment in one click. Besides, you'll appreciate the ease of scheduling multi-person meetings at once.
Doodle
In the free version, users can vote on the optimal meeting dates as well as suggest dates and times. Premium users won't see any ads in their polls, will be able to establish deadlines for polls and gather contact details of the attendees of their meetings.
HubSpot Meetings Tool
This app enables you to do the following with your meeting page:
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Embed on your landing page or site
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Send as a link in an email
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Add form fields to collect people's contact details
When someone books an appointment with you, the time will be blocked off on your calendar. The person who created this event will receive an email confirmation. The app can integrate with your CRM, Google Calendar or Office 365 calendar.
Rallly
In addition to scheduling appointments, this app allows group members to vote on the optimal meeting times. You can use its chat and messaging functionality for discussions.
ScheduleOnce
This app supports a wide range of scheduling scenarios. You can integrate it with your payment solution, email provider or corporate website.
Setmore
You can easily build a public-facing booking page. Individuals who book time with you can receive automatic appointment notifications. With the free plan, you can use a maximum of 20 staff calendars.
SimplyBook
It was developed for service-based businesses and allows you to accept bookings directly from Instagram and Facebook. You can either build a custom booking page within the app or integrate the product with your company's site.
Square Appointments
This one doubles as a booking and payment solution. It allows you to accept integrated payments, charge cancellation fees for no-shows, send out automated reminders and build a free customer booking site.
Visibook
This app can synchronize with your calendar and send you reminders about upcoming meetings. It integrates with payment processing solutions — you should appreciate it if your company accepts deposits or booking fees from clients. After you talk to clients through text messages or email, the app will save all your communication history in one place.
Paid Meeting Scheduling Apps
Acuity Scheduling
It differentiates from most scheduling apps because it doubles as an online assistant. You can use it for the following purposes:
You'll be able to customize appointment confirmations with your branding.
Bookeo Appointments
Thanks to this app, you can not only set appointments but also track how your meeting contacts progress through the sales pipeline. This product integrates with HubSpot where you can store the contact details of your clients. Your schedule will be updated in real-time.
GenBook
This one is perfect for smaller companies that need to juggle multiple calendars, schedule several meetings and make bookings. GenBook enables you to consolidate payments, customer management and gathering feedback in one interface.
HoneyBook
This tool was built to help you manage bookings throughout the entire sales process. It integrates with Google apps and other third-party tools. With HoneyBook, you can manage your customers, book initial meetings with them and send documents to them.
YouCanBook.me
It easily integrates with iCloud and Google Calendar to facilitate the process of booking meetings. You'll be able to share the booking grid by email, on Facebook or your website. The number of fields in the grid is unlimited and you can customize its style.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you found this article informative and it helped you to understand the importance of scheduling apps. The list in this article is by no means exhaustive and you can find many other worthy solutions on the market. You might want to opt for Bitrix24 because apart from the scheduling functionality, this product can help you to cope with many other tasks: manage your time, distribute duties and responsibilities among your team members, monitor progress, use an in-built contact center, generate reports to estimate your productivity and so on. You can try the free version of Bitrix24 in mobile, on-premise or cloud format first and upgrade to a paid plan later.
