Did you know that it takes on an average of 7-8 email exchanges or roughly 6-29 minutes for you to schedule a meeting with prospects or customers? On the other hand, the right kind of tool like FreeBusy which uses Inbound Scheduling can help you get such meetings scheduled in under 30 seconds. All you need to do is signup to FreeBusy and start a 14-day free trial to transform your scheduling workflow with inbound scheduling.

Let's take a look at factors that you should consider while choosing the right platform for your needs.

So what is Inbound Scheduling?
It is a new approach to appointment scheduling, where you empower your customers with the ability to check your or your team's availability and directly set up appointments at a time and place that works for both you and the customer.

Whether you want to schedule demo calls, onboard new customers to the product, conduct follow-up meetings or respond to customer support tickets, inbound scheduling can help you schedule all such meetings in seconds.

It works wonders for every business by:

  • Reducing the sales cycle
    It saves time at every stage of the sales funnel by automatically scheduling discovery calls from landing pages, demo calls from email campaigns, follow-up calls etc.

  • Improving Net Promoter Score
    Inbound Scheduling makes it quick and easy for customers to connect with your support team and get their problems resolved. This seamless experience adds to customer delight and loyalty driving higher NPS for your team

  • Building strong relationships
    When customers are able to easily access your team's availability and are able to see available time slots with complete transparency, it helps your team bank on the trust and cultivate long term relationships

Sounds too good to be true? Experience it for yourself

But not every scheduling tool would help you achieve the results that you need. Here are some important factors that you should consider:

  1. Are you protected against double bookings?
    One of the most important objective of inbound scheduling is to show your customers only the truly free times that they can book with you. So make sure your scheduling tool can integrate with all your calendars, be it work or personal (even if they are a mix of Outlook, Google, Yahoo, etc.)

FreeBusy allows integrating unlimited number of calendars and supports native integration with over 15 different calendar systems. Check here if your calendar system is listed

  1. Does it work well alongside your emailing and other tools?
    Scheduling a meeting is not a standalone activity but is always part of a workflow. And you should be able to use your scheduling tool while you are reaching out to a contact in your CRM, or while you are writing an email, drafting a campaign, building a landing page, reaching out to prospects on LinkedIn etc.

FreeBusy brings automated scheduling right at your finger tips with an Outlook add-on, a powerful Chrome extension with Gmail add-on, as well as a FreeBusy Scheduler for Salesforce.

  1. Can you use inbound scheduling as a team?
    There are several scenarios where you should offer your availability as a team. For example, customers should be able to schedule a demo call or a support call with any member of the relevant team. Some support calls may require members of two teams to be present at the same time.

FreeBusy allows you a variety of such team availability options: round-robin, collective, pick-a-member etc. to help you use inbound scheduling across your different use cases.

  1. Does it save a ton of manual work when a meeting is scheduled?
    When a meeting is scheduled, it involves a lot of manual work like updating the records in CRM, adding web conferencing links for the meeting, sending out invites and reminders to avoid last minute cancellations etc. Imagine doing this for all your meetings in a day.

FreeBusy integrates with all major web conferencing services to auto-add conference details for the meeting, and auto-updates records in CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign and Zoho.

There are several other capabilities that you should look for in a scheduling tool like managing your availability, adding buffers between meetings, ability to suggest times and collect votes to find the best time etc. But if you aren't already using inbound scheduling, you certainly should get started right away.

Start your 14-day free trial for inbound scheduling