Are you in a business where appointments are a necessity? You’ll know that following up with people, finding the right time can be such a pain. I don’t normally do appointments but in BlogEvangelists, I do offer private technical manager/consultant services that require scheduling.

By the way if you need technical management/consulting/assistance, watch the blog or sign up for the newsletter for an announcement.

Back to the point, I didn’t want to manually schedule these people and did not relish the idea of having clients play email ping pong trying to find the right time. Even though things like these can be easily outsourced, I prefer to seek automation first before real life staff because

1. Staff time is valuable as well as pricey. I’d much rather they help me with things that actually move projects along than administrative work.
2. Automation is (usually) cheaper.

There’s a lot more I could say about that but that’s another post. On scheduling, to me, the best way is to present my open dates to clients and let them match up the dates and times on their own. I decided to use GenBook.

Here’s why. Click the images to see a larger image.

I like the simplicity of GenBook. The back end is nicely laid out and clear. There are also no weird language and self-coined terms to describe common things.

When you first log in, you’ll see a quick snap shot of appointments for the day. One small change I would like to see here is week, 2 weeks or month view to see upcoming appointments.

When you have a new appointment, and are logged in, it will present you a flashing message in your dashboard.

From the calendar you can quickly edit the appointments and change details if need to.

I also like that you can set up different services. And different staff members who will be providing that service. So if you have multiple staff handling different products this is handy. You can also group staff – nice if you have departments or just want to organize by product. Each group will get their own calendar.

The appointment settings are well thought out. You can set up appointment lead times and operating hours. The lead times are cool so you can control how far ahead you can schedule someone and how late they can book time with you. A shorter minimum lead time means you have less last minute books. You can receive appointment notifications via email or text message.

You can also set it to automatically remind customers via email – sent 24 hours ahead of time. A must have. You can also create confirmation messages that will be emailed after someone creates an appointment with you.

Here’s one of my favorite features. Cancellation. Instead of handling cancellations manually, GenBook also does it for you. You can set a policy like no cancellations if less than 1 hour notice etc. And you can allow them to cancel their appointments online. You can turn this off but for me, this is a good thing to have turned on.

You can also choose to capture customer address or capture it based on which services you offer. Or ask customers for additional data which might be helpful to help you prepare for the appointment.

Perhaps what I like most is the fact that you can use Genbook as your whole order system. If you go for premium, you can take payment and then let the customer schedule their appointments all in one place. You don’t even need a web site for this as they do generate a page for you. But of course, having your own web site is best.

Last but not least, you can even allow customers to leave a review about you. Pacing through the whole booking process as a customer it was simple too. All your customers do is Select a service they are interested to book, Select an available date and time Enter their details like name, email, address, phone number etc and submit.

They’ll receive a confirmation – so do you and also reminders 24 hours before the appointment. This is very hands free for your business and gives your clients complete control over their appointments.

Genbook accounts start at $0 – which still have plenty of features. But if you want to take payments and get access to a full list customer information like address and a few other premium features, it is $39.99 a month. Just to be clear you will have access to your client information but in free accounts, you have to review them each individually and probably cannot export the list.