Pool of resources: How to improve appointment management

Pool of resources: How to improve appointment management

John Wordingham |May 19 2021 4 min

Managing multiple appointments has always been a complex challenge for service providers. For many years, we at Qmatic have identified and removed friction from the appointment process. In this article, I'll explain an important feature that will make it easier for you to reserve resources such as staff members, meeting rooms, and any equipment needed for the service.

 

Have you ever welcomed a visitor just to realize you forgot to book a meeting room? Many of the customers I talk to share this experience usually. Sometimes you might be lucky, and there is an available room for you to occupy spontaneously. But if all meeting rooms are unavailable, it will affect the quality of the meeting and jeopardize the visitor's experience and privacy. 

Appointment scheduling with multiple resources

At first glance, appointment scheduling appears to be pretty straightforward. The visitor books an appointment, and a couple of days later, he or she shows up at your facility. Yet, the truth is the process of managing appointments is much more complex than one might think. If you break down the process, you'll soon see that most appointments require multiple appointment resources. 

What is an appointment resource?

An appointment resource is everything that needs to be reserved for the appointment, below are a few examples of common appointment resources.

Staff members

Some appointments require the visitor to book a meeting with a specific staff member at your company. This may be because they have had a meeting before or that they request particular knowledge. 

Meeting rooms

If the appointment is about any private or sensitive matter, it's a prerequisite that you have a meeting room during the appointment. Also, some services can only be performed in specific rooms.

Equipment

Many service appointments involve some kind of equipment. Yet perhaps there is only limited equipment on site. To ensure that the visitor receives the help they need, the equipment must be reserved in time.

How to improve your appointment management using multiple resources

When I meet service providers today, they often tell me that they manually handle the reservation of resources. This means that when a visitor schedules an appointment, you must schedule the employee who has the right skill for that specific case. You also need to book a meeting room and reserve the right equipment. Handling this manually is both time-consuming but also increases the risk that something goes wrong.

Automate the reservation of appointment resources

The best way to ensure the high quality of your appointments is to automate the reservation of appointment resources. This can be done through a more advanced appointment system such as Qmatic Cloud Appointments, which has the capability to manage several resources simultaneously.

 

With the right appointment system, you can easily link different services with different resources. By setting up pools of resources, the system determines what time slots all resources are available and, based on that, gives the customer options of when to schedule the appointment. This means that in all time slots where predetermined resources are unavailable, such as the right employee, the right room, or the right equipment, an appointment can't be scheduled. 

 

Once the visitor schedules an appointment, all the required resources are automatically reserved for the time and date, allowing the visitor and staff to only remember to show up.

 

Do you want to know more about how Qmatic Cloud Appointments can help you streamline your appointment management? Click the button below to talk to an expert. 

 

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