Zoho Bookings Survey Shows Small Businesses Still Struggle with Scheduling

If your small business sees clients and customers by appointment, scheduling becomes your lifeblood.

So it may surprise you to learn that 72.83% of U.S. small businesses still primarily use email to set appointments.

Never mind the fact that more sophisticated options like Zoho Bookings offer a way to drastically improve scheduling for small businesses of all kinds.

“Despite the growth of scheduling tools, legacy methods continue to dominate across

SMBs,” explains a new survey created by the Zoho Bookings team.

“Email threads and phone calls remain the default, even as more efficient alternatives become increasingly accessible.”

Say Goodbye to Email Scheduling

Imagine you run a barber shop in Brooklyn, New York. You’ve mastered 360 waves, drop fades, taper afros, twists, locks and more. Your clients and customers love your work.

But you still manage your appointments by email.

Yikes!

Or imagine you run an insurance agency in Bridgeport, Connecticut. You might meet with clients at the local coffee shop, at your office, or online.

Now imagine scheduling all these appointments with email threads and then trying to jot them all down in your calendar. You will have to hope nothing falls through the cracks.

Who wants to live like this?

Stop the Drain of Back and Forth

Concern over scheduling through email goes beyond worry over missed appointments. Though that problem certainly exists.

It also happens to be the greatest drain on a small business’s most valuable resource: time.

According to the Zoho Bookings survey, 46.1% of respondents said the back-and-forth involved in more traditional scheduling like email ends up being a huge waste of hours.

Consider a life coach in Tucson, Arizona who meets with most of her clients one on one online – since many are spread throughout the world.

Using email for appointments seemed workable in the beginning. But with more clients every month, our hypothetical life coach finds her time more and more taken up by scheduling.

An incoming email from a new lead results in lots of back and forth trying to settle on a date for a first session.

Existing clients need to occasionally reschedule too resulting in even more emails.

Multiply this over a larger and larger number of customers. Soon our life coach lacks time to prepare for new sessions.

She also lacks adequate time to create videos, blog posts and other content — another important part of the service she provides.

Look At Other Ways Scheduling Inefficiencies Create Challenges

First, 34.65% of respondents say they see increased no shows due to scheduling problems, according to the survey.

A periodontist in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania may see a drop in patients keeping their appointments. Perhaps confirmations remain lost in email threads causing confusion.

Another 31.98% of respondents say double bookings and other conflicts result from these issues.

Meanwhile, 23.62% of respondents report uneven team schedules as a result.

Consider running a beauty salon in Detroit, Michigan. You schedule an extra beautician to handle two clients who never materialize.

Another 21.65% of respondents to the survey say these challenges also lead to inefficient resource management.

Perhaps an accountant in Portland, Oregon spends a few hours preparing a report for a client who doesn’t show due to scheduling confusion.

That same client won’t pay you for a meeting he never attended. So 16.93% of respondents say late payments also remain related challenges.

Another 9.45% of respondents listed increased administrative costs as a result of scheduling challenges.

Learn How Much Inefficient Scheduling Costs You

How much time does scheduling actually take up? Remember, this represents time you can’t use to get other things done in your business.

First, about half of respondents – 46.46% – estimate they spend more than an hour to get a single appointment scheduled.

This may include back and forth in email or on the phone to finalize an appointment and get it on the calendar.

Meanwhile, 28.35% estimate it takes 1 to 6 hours to finalize and schedule an appointment, 13.78% think it’s 6 to 12 hours, 7.27% estimate 12 to 24 hours, and 1.97% say more than a day.

A minuscule 1.18% say they just don’t know.

Needless to say, it makes little difference how long you believe scheduling takes you. As the number of clients increases the time taken up in scheduling grows exponentially.

“The gap between how often businesses schedule and how efficiently they do it is where automation can deliver significant operational benefits, especially for SMBs with lean teams, by reducing time spent on coordination and freeing resources for core activities,” the Zoho Bookings survey report explains.

Add Effortless Flow to Your Scheduling Process

Fortunately, automation in the form of scheduling software like Zoho Bookings offers another option.

Zoho Bookings allows you to set up your hours and availability. Then customers or clients simply schedule the appointments that work for them.

Forget back and forth emails. Watch your schedule fill up while you spend your valuable time doing something else in your business.

Don’t Pick Up The Phone

The phone seems even more old school than email. Yet 57.1% of small businesses in the U.S, still use it to schedule appointments with clients, according to the Zoho Bookings survey.

Booking appointments with clients by phone and then entering them into your calendar may seem perfectly workable for some. (And, this may also depend on the number of these calls you need to take or make.)

But imagine being an ophthalmologist in Raleigh, North Carolina. Your reception desk needs to make calls to remind patients of annual checkups.

Or they need to handle a flurry or incoming calls when you send out your annual appointment reminders.

This decreases the time they can spend fielding more important calls from patients. These end up being questions that require real humans to answer.

They include medical questions, billing questions, or questions about the practice and the services you provide.

Look for Digital Solutions

Replacing email and phone with appointment scheduling software resolves many of these problems.

In fact, scheduling software ranks third as the most used scheduling solution for U.S. small businesses.

With 33.65% of organizations in the U.S. using software for scheduling, this option ranks far above calendar app invites and website forms.

But it also ranks far above a number of other low tech and high tech solutions like pen and paper, spreadsheets, walk-ins or chatbots.

“Manual scheduling carries a hidden cost,” the survey observes. “It surfaces as wasted hours, missed appointments, and customers who move on because booking was too complicated.”

And the problems that arise seem magnified in small businesses where fewer employees mean not as many people to take up the slack.

“For SMBs where a single person often handles sales, operations, and customer service, these friction points hit harder than they do at larger organizations,” the survey authors explain.

Add A Virtual Meeting Component

Choose a scheduling software that enables virtual meetings as well.

Earlier we looked at a life coach with clients scattered all over the world. Such a business certainly requires virtual meetings for any interactive exchange.

But Zoho Bookings’ survey found most of your competitors provide a combination of both.

According to the survey, 21.26% of businesses reported offering exclusively in person service while 15.75% said they were exclusively virtual.

But 62.99% of respondents said they offered a hybrid of virtual and in person options for clients.

Give Clients a Choice of Meeting Format

Imagine you work as a therapist in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

Though you have clients in Sherman Oaks, North Hollywood and Encino, some prefer not to drive what can sometimes be as much as 20 minutes for an in person session.

Or imagine you run a financial planning practice in somewhere like Billings, Montana.

Clients in neighboring Lockwood, Huntley or Columbus might need to drive anywhere from 15 minutes to almost an hour to reach your office.

While clients in Bozeman might drive over two hours.

In either scenario, some might consider the trip worthwhile for an in person meeting. Others will not.

So offering both virtual and in-person meetings seems a good idea to keep all your clients happy.

“The hybrid approach is now the norm,” Zoho reports.

“With nearly 63% of businesses offering both formats, meeting flexibility has moved from being a nice extra to something customers simply expect.”

Integrating Zoho Bookings with Zoho Meeting allows you to offer virtual appointments from the scheduling application itself.

This allows you to automate the bookings while also offering flexibility to clients about whether appointments are held in person or virtually.

Watch Your Customer Service Improve

Some small business owners may worry that using scheduling software takes away from the personal attention they give clients.

That worry only increases when you throw AI into the equation. Take the AI scheduling now available from Zoho Bookings.

In fact, 51.2% of respondents to the Zoho Bookings survey indicated they were concerned AI would eliminate the personal touch from their customer relationships.

None-the-less 58.7% of respondents report being comfortable with AI handling scheduling for their business.

Take Advantage of AI in Appointment Scheduling

Despite this apparent comfort with AI-assisted scheduling, few respondents have actually implemented it.

Only 20.8% of those surveyed currently use AI-assisted scheduling. While an incredible 79.92% do not.

Given the incredible advantage automated scheduling with AI-tools offers, early adopters can expect to leave competitors using email or phone far behind.

And given that 58.7% of respondents can already see the value here even though some have not yet adopted it, your business may want to get ahead of the pack.

Automaton Improves Customer Satisfaction

Despite concerns, there seems to be little cause to worry about how scheduling automation will impact customer experience.

In the same survey, 56.8% of small business owners who use scheduling software said it directly improved their customer service.

This makes sense when you think about it. Would you rather phone your doctor and leave a message because the front desk is too busy with existing calls?

Or would it be better to pop onto your doctor’s scheduling software and choose from available options that fit your schedule?

The first option will result in waiting for someone to call back within the next business day and at that time help you set up an appointment.

And if you miss that call you can play phone tag with the office over the next few hours or days until you finally connect.

Which scenario would you feel gave you as a patient the best service?

Coordinate Your Internal Team Scheduling

Finally, scheduling software offers a great potential to streamline internal scheduling as well.

According to the Zoho Bookings Survey, internal scheduling at many small businesses continues to be a mishmash.

Imagine you run an online marketing agency or software company. You need to meet with a client on a global campaign or a customer interested in implementing your software.

You employ in the first case a global team of copywriters, designers and marketing specialists. In the second you have developers, engineers and IT support.

How do you efficiently set up a meeting for all these people and your clients?

Nearly half, 51.6%, of small businesses surveyed say they use messaging apps or email. But in either case, you can easily imagine how back and forth could take time.

And agreed upon dates could easily be lost in chat or email threads. Another 48% of respondents acknowledged using a shared calendar dashboard.

But 43.3% reported checking team availability manually and 17.32% said they routed scheduling through the front desk.

For many of these businesses, considerable overlap exists as they use a mix of techniques when trying to put team meetings together.

These small businesses could obviously do better.

Final Thoughts

If your small business hasn’t switched to scheduling software, it’s time to make a change.

Using email for scheduling creates back and forth that drains away time you could be using on other parts of your business.

It also allows appointment confirmations to be lost in email threads creating confusion and possible missed appointments.

Making appointments by phone ties up staff who could be fielding more important calls. It also creates delays when leaving messages that may not be answered until the next day.

Using scheduling software increases efficiency by allowing customers to schedule appointments based on your availability.

Also nearly 57% of respondents to a recent survey say scheduling software directly improves customer service.

To get started with scheduling software in your small business, visit Zoho Bookings. Or contact the Zoho sales team.

This article, "Zoho Bookings Survey Shows Small Businesses Still Struggle with Scheduling" was first published on Small Business Trends