How often do you schedule meetings?
Whilst the process is straightforward have you ever sat down and crunched the numbers on how much time every year you waste when scheduling a meeting?
In this article, we will show you the secret and clever method of scheduling a meeting. Not only will this save you a whole bunch of time – but it will also make you look like the technology genius you really are. (With a little help from us at Aberdeen Cyber Security!)
Let us first do the math on how long it really takes to schedule a meeting. Before we start – the reason you are still doing it this way is due to the fact that it’s fairly painless. However, when you crunch the numbers of a whole year, you will soon realise how much time your wasting.
The average meeting takes between 5-8 emails to schedule. Firstly, it takes time to write the initial email asking for the meeting or suggesting the meeting then a further email to accept/decline the offer. After that another email to put out a time/date – then another – then another – and possibly another. Once you have both agreed on a time/date – well that’s an email too.
To keep this simple let us say that email chain is around 10 minutes. If you are scheduling around 6 emails a week that’s almost 1 hour. Of the course of a 200 working day year, you’ll be adding up to over 1 day (33 hours).
The process is painless but your time is more valuable!
The solution to this problem comes in the form of software. There are a number of vendors now in the space that offers web apps and software services to automate the email booking process. We use HubSpot for this.
Whilst there’s a number to choose from, here is an example of what the process now looks like:
1: The potential client will be on your website and open the meeting request button.
2: The client will follow the process of booking the meeting via the automatic chat bot. The client gets to choose the length of the meeting and also what day the meeting takes place on.
3: The client will automatically receive the following email after booking.
4: You, as the host will also receive an automatic email after the client has booked the session.
The new process is fairly slick. It’s what we use on our website.
All that you have to provide is your own private URL to the scheduling service. It will automatically read the contents of your calendar. Now, all your contact has to do is select a date and time. In the example above the system will automatically send you both the meeting invite with location auto-populated.
The neat thing about these scheduling services is that you can specify things like when people can book meeting with you. Maybe you prefer meetings in the morning – tell the scheduling assistant that meetings can only be booked from 8am to 11am.
You can also create buffer zones between meetings so if you’ve got a number of meeting on in the day you can create a buffer so when booking a meeting they’ll never be scheduled back to back.
This is just one of many examples of how we can make your business more efficient using IT & technology. Please do contact us today at Aberdeen Cyber Security for all of your IT, Cyber Security and Technology needs.