How to Let Clients Book Appointments On Their Own: Online Appointment Systems Review

If you are a coach or a consultant, letting your clients book appointments online with you can save a lot of time and hassle of having to email back and forth to arrange appointments. This is one of my secret weapons of staying productive and managing my time effectively. Read on to find out how to get started!

Online diary management and appointment systems can be a real time-saver for your small business.

They give the power to your clients to self-service and arrange appointments with you at convenient time. Online systems also will allow clients to easily re-schedule their appointment if they can’t make it or cancel it completely, all without taking up any of your previous time.

It’s quite easy to get started:

1) Set up a Google Calendar for all appointments.

If you are not already using Google Calendar to manage your appointments, you can get a free Google Account created, then move all your meetings and appointments from whatever system you have in place to Google. By having everything in one central place you will save time and potentially the risk of losing your paper diary and your “paper brain”.

2) Choose the right system for your business.

There are 10s of different online diary systems on the market. All you need to do is choose the one that’s best suited for your needs and the type of appointments your clients will be booking. More on this below!

3) Integrate the system with Google Calendar and set up your appointment choices.

Usually you will be able to select your appointment types you want to offer: free or paid, 30min or 60min, one-off or recurring and so one. Once you’ve got everything configured and linked to Google, do a test run – book an appointment with yourself to test that all notifications were delivered as expected, that appointment was added to your Google Calendar, that payment was processed successfully – so that your clients can have the best possible experience.

Finally, you are now ready to send the link out to your clients, prospects and leads – and offer them to book appointments with you online!

Online Appointment Systems Options

1) TimeTrade

Relatively cheap system that allows you to create multiple appointment types (pages), customise pages with your branding, link to Google Calendar, and send initial confirmation to the user.

The downsides are that you need to manually select your available times in the diary settings, there are no email reminders, you can’t offer paid appointments and you can’t customise the booking form to collect additional information. Also I found that many clients forgot to click the final Confirm button again, and their appointment wasn’t actually booked although they’ve selected the time and filled in the form.

If you’d like a quick tutorial on how to get started with using TimeTrade, watch the video below.

2) ScheduleOnce

A lot more powerful system than TimeTrade with a higher cost too. It can send multiple reminders to clients, everything is customisable and can be branded like your business, appointment booking forms can have additional fields. You can also book appointments for a team and even schedule resources like meeting rooms. ScheduleOnce integrates with Infusionsoft and Webex/GoToWebinar if you need to automatically create webinar events for appointments or client training sessions.

The downsides are that you can only have 2 booking pages with the standard account (but multiple appointment types on each page) and you can’t accept payments for appointments, although you can specify in appointment information what the cost is.

ScheduleOnce is the system that I currently use. If you’d like to book a Discovery Session with me to chat about my products and services – you can see it in action here: meetme.so/TamaraBaranova

3) Acuity Scheduling

Another powerful system with good customisation features, ability to accept payment for appointments (PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net) and it also integrates with email marketing systems like MailChimp and Aweber. You can create multiple appointment types, allow group bookings (for fitness classes for example), create custom notification emails.

The main downside for me was that it didn’t integrate with Infusionsoft to trigger campaigns, unless I used Zapier too. But if you are not using Infusionsoft – check this one out!

4) Vcita

Because they have their own CRM system add-on, email integrations are less developed compared to what Acuity has to offer for example. Appointment forms are less customisable, but you can request payments before an appointment can be confirmed. You can offer multiple appointment types but you can have 1 visible page – others can be booked by sharing a private link to the diary only. There is a nice WordPress plugin that pops up in the corner (like mine is set up with Schedule Once), but overall I found it less suitable for my needs than other systems I’ve tried so far.

You might like their online payments and invoicing system that can deposit payments into your PayPal account, and document sharing between you and clients.

5) Calendly

This system is gaining in popularity due to being free and also quite pretty. So if modern clean design is very important to you – this might be the system you’ll like the best. For more than one event type you would need to use their premium account.

It’s quite a basic system: it doesn’t integrate with payment options, or email marketing systems, or social media. It doesn’t have a website widget or a plugin. But as your first diary management system, and if you only need something very simple and straight-forward, it might be perfectly sufficient.

Over to you…

Of course this was by no means an exhaustive list of all possible online diary management and appointment booking systems. So I’d love to know what systems you’ve tried, what you love and why. Just share your experiences and tips in comments below

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Thanks for reading!