The Best Appointment Scheduling Software for Your Small Business

As a busy professional or small business owner, your time is your most important and valuable asset. Making sure your calendar is full of appointments with existing and potential customers is vital to the long-term success of your business.

You’ve probably realized that there is a multitude of different types of software out there that all seek to make the process of managing your schedule as easy and painless as possible.

To make sure you are using your time efficiently, and to keep track of your busy schedule, you most likely use something like Google Calendar, Microsoft Office 365 Calendar, Microsoft Outlook Calendar, or Apple iCloud Calendar already.

Appointment Scheduling Software

These types of “cloud” calendars are terrific for managing your schedule across all of your devices. Adding an appointment on your computer automatically allows it show up on your smartphone, for instance.

While these tools work well for managing your calendar personally, sharing your calendar, and allowing others to book appointments and schedule meetings with you can quickly become challenging.

What if you want to allow your receptionist or assistant schedule appointments only in time slots that you have available on your calendar, without logging into your account and having access to your sensitive information?

What if you want to allow potential customers to book an appointment with you directly on your website, and block out time slots where a booking has already been scheduled to avoid a double-booking situation?

To find a solution to these problems, you will need to look into Appointment Scheduling software.

But, where do you start?

Luckily, we at Vicky Virtual Receptionists have done the research, and have discovered the best appointment scheduling software available that have completely transformed the way many of our clients run their businesses.

YouCanBook.Me

If you use Google Calendar or Apple iCloud Calendar, we highly recommend YouCanBook.me.

YouCanBook.me has offered a great introduction video here:

YouCanBook.Me is a simple, easy to use software that allows you to:

• Customize the look of your booking form
• Connect multiple calendars so customers can book with different members of your staff
• Publish your booking form to Facebook and Twitter
• Provide a custom URL where customers can go to book an appointment, or allows you to embed the booking form on your website
• Reduce no-shows by sending email or text reminders to your customers

Best of all, the basic version of YouCanBook.Me is completely free.

Calendly

If you use Microsoft Office 365 Calendar or Microsoft Outlook Calendar we highly recommend Calendly (which also integrates with Google Calendar).

Calendly is very similar to YouCanBook.Me as far as features and pricing go.

Here is their short, demonstration video:

https://calendly-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/invitee-flow-03-1024.mp4

Calendly is more simple in its features, but it still integrates with your calendar, and offers:

• Team scheduling that displays your team’s availability on one convenient booking page
• Checks your Office 365 or Outlook calendar for conflicts, so you’re never double-booked. Adds new events to your calendar automatically
• Unlimited scheduled events
• A custom URL where customers can go to book an appointment, or allows you to embed the booking form on your website
• Automatic email confirmations and reminders

Setmore

While YouCanBook.Me and Calendly are great for scheduling meetings with clients, you may want to offer different types of appointments and services to your customers to book.

Luckily, Setmore is perfect for this. Setmore actually allows you to set up a self-scheduling page where your customers can view all of the services you offer, your contact information, your location, your office hours, and allows them to book different types of services with the different members of your staff, and pay online.

Setmore provides you with a custom URL, or you can embed the form on your website:

Here is Setmore’s introduction video:

Setmore also allows you to display customer reviews on your booking page, and provides free iOS and Android apps so you can run your business on the go.

Setmore’s basic plan is also free!

Launch27

If you run a local service business, and need to provide a more complex booking form, assign jobs to teams, pay teams for work they’ve done, provide a back-end portal where your customers can log in and update their information on their own, and much more, Launch27 is the best software we know of.

Here is Launch27’s introduction video:

Here is how the customer back-end portal looks:

Launch27 allows you to offer pricing by the square foot, by number of rooms, combination of number of rooms and number of bathrooms, and much more.

Launch27 also allows you to offer your customer gift cards:

Jobber

Similar to Launch27, Jobber offers Landscapers, Residential Cleaners, Painters, Window Cleaners, HVAC, other service companies an easy way to handle scheduling, CRM, invoicing, and Team Management.

Here is Jobber’s introduction video:

You can see all of Jobber’s features here.

Let us book your appointments for you!

After you’ve decided on the perfect appointment scheduling software for you, allow our awesome team of virtual receptionists answer your calls, impress your potential customers, and book your appointments for you!

At Vicky Virtual Receptionists, we can integrate with all of the software mentioned here, plus many more.

To find out more about us, view our Services page.

We offer a FREE, 7-day trial so that you can take us for a test drive and see what we can do for you.

If you’re interested in taking advantage of this free trial, click here:

Originally published at blog.vickyvirtual.com on December 15, 2015.