Do you lose time finding mutually good occasions to meet?
Finding that you have more meetings to schedule now that you are virtual?
Have you tried the Calendly app?
Here, red10‘s Karen Hyde explains how Calendly can save you time.
red10 recently tested two online appointment booking tools because we wanted a quick and simple way for clients to choose and book a meeting with our consultants.
Navigating calendars to find a suitable meeting time can often take more time than the meeting. I think we’ve all been here:
“Can you make 3pm or 4pm on Friday”
“No but I can do 9am on Thursday”
“That’s not good for me”
“Shall we look at next week?”
“Sorry, I’m on holiday”
We experimented with Microsoft Bookings and Calendly and decided we liked the Calendly features best and went on to live test the full Calendly app https://calendly.com/.
red10‘s Will Sudworth said,
“I’m so pleased with how the app is working.
Karen has set up and integrated my calendar and my Zoom room.
I send a Calendly link to a client allowing them to browse when I’m available. They can either schedule the meeting themselves or fill in the fields in Calendly so that it books it all for us. They also then have the option to change and cancel, if they need to”
Calendly draws information about your available time from your Outlook, iCloud or Google calendars. Calendly allows you to combine more than one calendar such as a personal and work calendar.
We tried the FREE version of Calendly first and that worked very well. The free version allows you to create one type of meeting only e.g. a 30min phone call.
Just be aware that if you are about to give it a try, when you sign up to Calendly it automatically gives you the Pro Trial which gets downgraded after 14 days so some of the paid for features will be removed after that date!
The End Result
You create a handful of the most common meetings that you have, e.g.
- 30-min phone call
- 45-mins Zoom
- 1hr Zoom
You can offer out just one type of meeting, or offer out all the options.
Calendly will set default working hours for you e.g. 9:00am-5:00pm Monday through Friday and you can customise those in the app.
There are advanced options on the buffer you’d like to have between meetings, and how much notice you need to have.
Get ready – calendar housekeeping
For Calendly to work well, the source calendars you’ll be using need to be up-to-date and if you want to keep periods of time to yourself, you’ll need to block it out, otherwise the space shows in Calendly as available time.
Getting going
When you’ve set up the meeting types in the app, you’ll get a personal link to share so that clients or colleagues can pick a time and their event is added to your calendar.
Can it do Virtual Meetings?
Yes, Calendly integrates with Zoom, Skype and teams.
Date and Time Zones
Because many of our clients are in different time zones around the world, it’s great that they can our availability in their local time zone
Could Calendly be a helpful time-saver for you?