Appointments vs walk-ins

[Emily C]

hi!
At my jurisdiction, we are working on implementing appointments to encourage the public to sort of do their own research before just walking in blind.
I found this cool thing through outlook called "Bookings" and I'm doing a soft launch of it before we "go live."
I've heard of Calendly (Calendy???) but I'm wanting to try something free before I propose a subscription. My question is, do you use something for appointments? What is it? How is it working? Is the public receptive to it or is there resistance? Do you have any tips for success??

Thanks all!

 

[johnreynolds]

Business person here Well familiar with a few tools:

https://savvycal.com/ - this is my favorite in terms of product user interface. It allows a guest to overlay their personal calendar over your calendar so they can see the overlapping availability.

https://calendly.com/ - This one is kind of the industry standard. The real advantage with this one is that it has a ton of integrations, in case that's important to you.

I personally use HubSpot, which is our sales software. Probably not the best fit for a government entity.

I haven't tried the Outlook calendar booking link, but I have tried the Google Calendar one. It's not very robust. Calendly or SavvyCal are definitely much easier to use. One thing I've noticed is that these scheduling links work really well for business people, but the general public isn't used to it, and it seems to throw them off. However, I think you should try it out - seems like it could save city staff a ton of annoying back-and-forth emails.

 

[Emily C]

Thanks for the recommendations, I'll check them out!

 

[Bobby McClanahan]

Hi Emily,

We use a "preliminary project review application" & charge a fee which gets a 1- hour meeting with city staff (City Planner, Building Official/Engineering Coordinator, Fire Chief & Public Works Director). Since I schedule inspections-I just add the meeting to the inspection calendar & send an invite to all involved. This works well most of the time since we are a small district (-10,000 population). The applicant is required to submit a site plan & preliminary drawing for staff review along with their application.

I hope this helps

 

[alishna]

Hey, that’s really cool! We’ve been using Bookings for our appointments too, and once people got used to it, it’s been pretty smooth. A quick FAQ or step-by-step email up front helped cut down on confusion. Starting with a free option is a smart way to test things out before committing to a paid one.

 

[Eric]

Hey, that’s really cool! We’ve been using Bookings for our appointments too, and once people got used to it, it’s been pretty smooth. A quick FAQ or step-by-step email up front helped cut down on confusion. Starting with a free option is a smart way to test things out before committing to a paid one.

Great to hear a success story with Bookings. This is the first I've heard that Outlook offers such a scheduler. I tried Calendly, which was super user friendly, but the appointments didn't integrate directly with Outlook for me. That was problematic because it meant I had to juggle and avoid conflicts across two different calendars, which was just too inconvenient to deal with in the end.

Having an Outlook-native scheduler would definitely make a difference for me being able to adopt something like this. I'm somehow skeptical that Bookings is supported on my firewalled government system, but I'm going to look into it.

 

[Emily C]

Great to hear a success story with Bookings. This is the first I've heard that Outlook offers such a scheduler. I tried Calendly, which was super user friendly, but the appointments didn't integrate directly with Outlook for me. That was problematic because it meant I had to juggle and avoid conflicts across two different calendars, which was just too inconvenient to deal with in the end.

Having an Outlook-native scheduler would definitely make a difference for me being able to adopt something like this. I'm somehow skeptical that Bookings is supported on my firewalled government system, but I'm going to look into it.

One thing I've seen w/ Bookings is that you can customize hours you're available, OR have it sync with your existing calendar. Either option avoids the double booking nightmare.