April 28, 2008

Resource: Upgrade Your Appointment Scheduling

Have you ever considered that how you schedule appointments affects your professional presentation?

It can either confirm your professionalism or chip away at it.

Here are two ways to upgrade your presentation when scheduling appointments.

Level 1: Low-Tech Upgrade

For those using a paper planner…

Get a large Professional Planner that holds weekly appointments.

This means each week you have two pages open, showing your openings for Monday – Sunday.

If you’re pulling out your tiny planner (or some other scrappy looking calendar) in front of clients and squeezing in appointments into a monthly-style calendar, you look very small-time.

Even if your clients never see your tiny planner, it makes it hard for you to have room for more than two or three clients per day.

Not only does this look messy, it just doesn’t inspire confidence nor does it look like you take your business seriously.

Invest in a nice, professional looking planner.

I recommend Franklin Covey planners. I used the "classic weekly planner" in a nice zip-up case for years.

Level 2: High-Tech Upgrade

This is like having a virtual assistant without the assistant.

The service I use is Appointment Quest.

It’s only about $20 per month and it takes about an hour or less to set up.

You select when you work, block times for when you don’t and when someone is ready to book an appointment you send them an email link.

Your potential client then goes into your online scheduler, registers for free and then picks a time based on your availabilities.

The beauty of this service is that it helps you enforce your boundaries, bypasses the back-n-forth of scheduling and well, it really makes you look like you’ve got it together.

It also forces your clients to take responsibility for their sessions by booking themselves into your schedule. (And the system automatically sends reminders to all of your appointments!)

When a client registers into your system, you get an email with two attachments. One with the complete contact info of your client (no more manually adding them into your database) and one that automatically saves the appointment into your contact management system (outlook, entourage, ACT!, etc…)

I put off this service because I only work with a small number of client projects at a time, thinking I should just “deal” with the scheduling myself. What a mistake!

The payoff of using this service has been huge!

Now when people sign up for an initial consultation via my contact page on my website, I set up an email autoresponder from my shopping cart system to instantly send them a big hello and give them the link to my online schedule. The client doesn’t have to wait for me to get back to them. Then I can go into the system and manually confirm or deny the appointment once I receive it. It’s so easy and best of all, it makes me look like I take my business and my time seriously, thus setting the tone for all future conversations.

Here's to upgrading your professional presentation,

Karin

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Filed under Blog, Materials that Work, Resources by Karin