Online Appointment Scheduling with Microsoft Bookings

02 Jan

Online Appointment Scheduling with Microsoft Bookings

By: Natasha Ambo Business Systems Comments: No Comments

Are you a small business faced with constant phone calls and text from customers trying to make appointments, but not enough staff to help manage these appointments? If so, you may want to start looking into online appointment scheduling.

If you’re thinking that this may be too costly and complex to set up, it does not have to be. In fact, if you are using Microsoft Office 365 for email or office applications, you may already have access to booking software that you can put to use.

Microsoft offers its Microsoft Bookings product for free with its Office 365 premium subscription. This means as a small business, have customers book and make payments online for free with your subscription. This is a big boost to draw customers to your business by targeting the online market. For many, performing transactions online may be more convenient than a phone call or text message. Hence, using an online scheduling tool, can bring more customers to the door. This can benefit business like hair salons, doctor’s offices, professional services companies, departments for example.

Microsoft Bookings Features

Useful features include:

Show your availability with option for cushioning between appointment time slots. For example, make available 1 hour time slots but allow half hour before and after to be unavailable. Use the extra time perhaps for setting up or a short break between appointments. This also works well in case one of your appointments extends beyond the 1 hour time slot.
Customers can select the specific staff member for the appointment when booking. This is great when customers have a preferred specialist they want to work with.
Both customer and staff can reschedule and cancel appointments and get immediate notifications.
You can configure additional data to be collected at time of booking. This is very useful if you need to know specific information beforehand for the appointment. It allows you to prepare accordingly before meeting with the customer.
Worried about following up on your appointments? You can configure the system to send automatic confirmation email and reminders to both you and the customer.
Collect payments at the time of booking. How convenient is that? Not only are you left self-assured because you’ve already been paid, but this reduces no-shows since customers have already made the commitment by paying beforehand.
Block off time when you will not be available. Going on vacation, have a personal matter to handle for a few hours? You can make this time show as unavailable. Basically, you have full control of your schedule and how it should be presented to the customer.
Sync the Booking calendar with your personal Office 365 email calendar. Appointments made directly on your email calendar will automatically show as not available to customers. For example, if you added a doctor’s appointment to your personal Office 365 calendar, it will sync to Microsoft Bookings. The time will show to customers as being unavailable.

There are quite a few options for appointment scheduling software out there appealing to different types of businesses. These include Vcita, Vagaro, Acuity, Square, StyleSeats, Calendly to name a few. They all have advantages and when used correctly can be a great asset to your business marketing. Microsoft Bookings comes with the following added advantage. If your business already uses Office 365 email or software like Word, Excel, you most likely have the product. There is no additional cost to you.

If you don’t, then it’s worth it to consider Microsoft Office 365 for business. With a paid premium subscription ($12.50/mo at time of blog post), you can set up a custom domain email. This allows you to stand out professionally ([email protected]), have use of a feature rich email platform that many corporations have come to rely on, and access to Microsoft tools many are familiar with (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). And these tools include Microsoft Bookings.

Also, setting up Microsoft Bookings should not require you to have any advanced degree. It is on the simpler side when it comes to configuration. Click here for instructions on how to configure. Once your booking page is configured, you can simply share the URL directly with your customers, on social media or via your website. Then you’re ready to go.

If you have not yet tried Microsoft Bookings, try it out!

Need help configuring Microsoft Bookings or integrating another scheduling tool or CRM?

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