Effective scheduling: Advanced features to improve your appointment management

Today, most service providers enable appointment scheduling for visitors. But the way organizations manage appointments varies. In this article, I’ll describe some features which will streamline your scheduling process regardless of your industry or size.

The benefits of appointment scheduling

If you don’t allow your visitors to schedule appointments yet, you have numerous benefits to discover. By enabling appointment scheduling, you minimize visitors waiting time. Your workload will be distributed evenly throughout the days, and you’ll get a good overview of your demand. As your visitors have a scheduled time, they can better plan their day. 

Also, during the pandemic, many service providers discovered the importance of appointments from a social distancing perspective. With appointment scheduling, you minimize the number of people in your facility and ensure a safe visit for visitors and staff. 

Different solutions for appointment management

There are many different ways to handle appointments today. Some manage everything manually by telephone, while others automate the entire visit process, from scheduling the appointment to sending reminders or managing cancellations.

Traditionally, the more complex solutions have involved high start-up costs, which has hindered some organizations from acquiring the solutions they need. But thanks to new development such as the Qmatic Cloud Appointments, you get a solution that scales with you merely as you pay subscription-based pricing. 

This allows you to obtain the features which are generally included in more advanced scheduling appointment systems. To give you a glimpse of what these more advanced features are and how they can improve your appointment scheduling, I have created a list below. 

Advanced features to improve your appointment scheduling

You are probably familiar with the more basic features of appointment scheduling solutions. Below I introduce some more advanced features which you might haven’t heard about yet. 

Service grouping 

Service grouping, also known as service arrangement, is a feature that allows your visitors to make general selections in specific services. This simplifies the user experience as visitors don’t need to scroll long lists of services. 

Resource types

To carry out a service, various attributes may need to be reserved. Resource types are a feature that makes it possible to group attributes such as staff, rooms, and equipment. This is a feature that ensures that everything needed for the meeting is booked, which in turn minimizes manual administrative work.

Booking conditions

As a service provider, you want to make dependencies between the attributes needed for the appointment. For example, one type of service may require a specific employee and a specific room. Then with the feature booking condition, you can ensure that this service can’t be scheduled during timeslots when either the employee or room is unavailable.  

Resource pool

Most often, a group of employees has a specific and necessary skill to perform a service. With the feature resource pool, you can create a group of, e.g., specialists that share some like properties, ensuring that the visitors get their requested help.

Learn more about how to optimize your appointment management

These were just a few examples of features that can improve your appointment scheduling. Do you want to know more about the features you can acquire with subscription-based pricing? Don’t hesitate to contact us below.