Top organizations know that customer meetings matter. That’s why so many are bidding farewell to their basic, legacy tools and embracing the power of online booking solutions.
Globally, the appointment scheduling software market is expected to more than double over the next decade, reaching a value of nearly $1 billion by 2032. According to Fact.MR research, this impressive growth rate can be attributed to the corporate sector. Enterprises of all industries are increasing their investment in online scheduling platforms, aiming to book more customer meetings and drive key business outcomes.
The good news is that there’s an abundance of solutions on the market. However, few are made specifically for enterprise clients. In other words, many organizations are likely deploying scheduling software that isn’t fit for its purpose because most platforms are better suited for small business requirements.
Of course, this raises an important question: Which is the best appointment scheduling app for your specific business needs? Luckily, you’re in the right place.
Read on to learn more about the various options at your fingertips and how they compare to Jifflenow’s meeting scheduling automation software.
Why do high-performance teams and business executives need a best-in-class appointment scheduling app?
The short answer is simple: Customer meetings play a critical role in today’s fast-paced business landscape.
These engagements happen at crucial points in the buying process. They give sales reps, experts and executives an important opportunity to have direct conversations with potential customers. Whether it be a sales presentation or a product demonstration, meetings are powerful tools that not only accelerate the sales cycle, but also advance your pipeline and drive key business outcomes.
An effective appointment booking strategy can even stimulate short- and long-term business growth. Whereas prospect meetings allow you to acquire new customers, client meetings empower you to strengthen relationships and maximize customer lifetime value (CLV).
However, according to the RAIN Group, there’s a common misconception that buyers don’t want to hear from sales reps at all. Many believe that prospects come to a decision long before reaching out to a supplier.
In reality, 82% of buyers accept meetings with sellers at various points in their customer journey, but especially early on in the process. Let’s consider the research:
- 71% want to meet with sales reps when looking for new ways to drive results and improve their business.
- 62% request meetings when they’re actively looking for a new solution.
- 54% do so when they’re evaluating possible providers.
Clearly, customer and prospect meetings are welcome at all stages of the sales funnel — and in fact, just 2% of buyers don’t want to engage whatsoever. In other words, your target audience is more than willing to request and accept meetings and sessions.
Bottom line: It’s essential to book appointments, as they allow you to nurture prospects, close deals and retain clients.
Types of meetings
Buyers want customized content throughout the sales and marketing process, and even more so when it comes to meetings. Therefore, organizations should offer a range of meeting types that cover a wide variety of topics, pain points and objectives. For example:
- Executive meetings.
- Product demos.
- Expert meetings.
- Sales meetings.
- Partner meetings.
- … and many more.
It’s one thing to offer these types of engagements, but booking them is a challenge all to itself. Enterprises need a scheduling app with the capability to simplify the process and map each meeting type to specific locations, experts and topics of interest.
Who’s responsible for appointment booking?
Sales, marketing and executive admin teams are responsible for facilitating and executing this critical process.
Let’s break down their roles in more detail:
- Sales: Responsible for leveraging their prospect relationships to book outbound meetings and identify target accounts.
- Marketing: Facilitates an effective meeting environment and generates inbound meeting requests through promotional activities, such as webinar series or other marketing campaigns.
- Executive admins: Must prepare executives, brief them on upcoming meetings and manage schedules on their behalf.
Once again, it’s vital for enterprises to deploy a scheduling app that makes it simple for all stakeholders to complete their role in the appointment booking process. This is especially important given that many organizations use demand-generation and field marketing programs to drive inbound and outbound meetings.
In both cases, countless variables in play further complicate scheduling. For example, this workflow involves:
- Navigating countless calendars.
- Booking across multiple time zones.
- Confirming inbound requests mapped to the right internal expert and topic of interest.
- Facilitating outbound requests.
- Sending appointment reminders.
- Confirming room availability.
- Managing check-ins.
- Briefing internal attendees about each engagement.
- Notifying stakeholders of last-minute changes.
- Analyzing meeting data.
- Mapping outcomes back to each meeting.
These complicated challenges are too much to handle if you’re reliant on only the basic capabilities. High-performing organizations need a robust scheduling app that can effectively navigate these moving parts and empower teams to schedule more meetings and sessions that generate tangible results.
More than just the basic functionality of booking appointments, enterprises require software that can simplify and facilitate all three stages of the business meeting workflow:
- Meeting scheduling: Whether it’s before and during a trade show or following a marketing campaign, teams must book appointments as effectively and efficiently as possible. This involves identifying the correct internal participants, coordinating numerous calendars, setting locations and confirming requests. Teams must also send appointment reminders to all participants to avoid no-shows, last-minute cancellations and other issues that could hinder performance.
- Meeting management: Once meetings are set, organizations should ensure the venue is prepped and ready with all necessary technologies and other resources. Meeting managers must share briefing docs with all internal participants, identify roles and check in attendees when they arrive at the location. Immediately following the meeting, all relevant data should be shared and synced with marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software.
- Meeting analysis: Teams must analyze meeting data to enable continuous improvement. With a robust scheduling app, they can connect individual meetings back to influenced revenue, pipeline and other business objectives to understand performance on a more granular level. Moreover, event teams can measure resource utilization, allowing them to evaluate individual trade shows and determine the true ROI of their field marketing efforts. This is especially key given that rising event costs are compelling marketers to spend less and get more from their already limited budget.
All things considered, appointment scheduling is much more complex at an enterprise level than for a small business. The best way to simplify and optimize this process is to deploy an automated and feature-rich scheduling app made specifically for high-performance organizations.
Compare and contrast: Jifflenow vs. 12 appointment scheduling apps
Unlike most appointment scheduling apps, Jifflenow’s eEvent and eCampaign platforms are designed with enterprise clients in mind. As such, they come with all the tools you need to book more meetings, advance your sales pipeline and achieve long-term business goals.
That said, it’s still your job to do your homework and identify the very best scheduling app for your specific needs. So, we’ve compiled a list of the most popular appointment booking software providers on the market today.
Let’s review each one individually. We’ll discuss their key features, best use cases and whether they fit enterprise scheduling.
1. Doodle
Doodle’s appointment booking software offers a customizable experience for individuals and teams. Users can create a dedicated booking page branded to their business that people can use to request appointments directly.
Features and capabilities
Like any other scheduling tool, it provides calendar app integrations with most major providers, including Google Calendar, Outlook and more. It offers a variety of paid plan options, with each tier offering more advanced capabilities. For example, Doodle’s free plan allows users to create just one booking page, whereas its other plans allow more pages and unlimited appointments.
One of the platform’s key features is its calendar sync function, which is designed to help teams avoid double booking meetings. Additionally, it enables users to create group polls to determine the optimal time slot for all participants. Remote workers can also access Doodle through its proprietary mobile app.
Use case
Although Doodle markets its product as a suitable platform for individuals, teams and enterprises, it’s clearly a system best fit for internal collaboration. In other words, it’s not made to help organizations — and more specifically, field marketing teams — maximize customer meetings.
By contrast, Jifflenow’s eEvent software allows you to drive business growth at trade shows, conferences and other events. Its simple, comprehensive interface empowers marketers and sales teams to schedule, manage and analyze both in-person and virtual engagements. Accessible as a web app, mobile app and native Salesforce app, eEvent’s adaptable nature enables you to easily set up and manage meetings of all types.
2. Qualified
Qualified’s scheduling app is offered as part of its Pipeline Cloud platform, a marketing automation tool for revenue teams. The main goal of this scheduling app is to help customers transform their website into an automated meeting scheduler, providing a direct pathway between buyers and sellers.
Features
Qualified uses artificial intelligence to determine “VIP buyers.” When these prospects arrive on the site, a chatbot engages them in conversation and invites them to book a sales meeting or live demo. Calendar integration allows the user to see sales rep availability, allowing them to secure the slot of their choice.
However, this appointment scheduler doesn’t allow users to send an automated reminder to participants, which increases the risk of no-shows and double bookings. Moreover, this means teams must rely on email reminders to notify attendees of updates or cancellations. As a manual process, this is also prone to human error.
Use case
Qualified’s AI-driven meeting scheduler is an innovative asset, but ultimately isn’t fit for enterprise event scheduling complexities. Field marketers, sales reps and executive admins require more control over the workflow and must be able to map specific attendees to meeting types, locations, topics and more.
Jifflenow’s meeting scheduling automation software does exactly that. Whether it be on a booking page or elsewhere, users can customize the platform to include whatever type of meeting is most relevant to their interests at any given event. More importantly, requesters can book appointments with the sales reps and experts most applicable to their topic or product of interest, ensuring nobody’s time is wasted on an irrelevant engagement.
3. YouCanBook.Me
YouCanBook.Me offers a range of customizable online scheduling capabilities. It’s best known as the meeting scheduler that combines appointment booking with payment processing.
Features
The platform’s calendar integration allows users to easily synchronize availability, create a booking grid, and receive inbound requests. Users can share their booking page on social media or via email.
YouCanBook.Me enables you to offer a variety of appointment types and customize the interface according to your brand. It also automates messaging for follow-ups and appointment reminders, saving time spent on repetitive tasks. The app integrates with most video conferencing solutions, including Zoom and Google Meet.
Use case
YouCanBook.Me is most appropriate for small- and mid-size organizations. Payment processing isn’t an applicable feature for enterprise clients, who are more likely to negotiate multi-million dollar deals. The software also isn’t recommended for companies with complex scheduling and reporting needs, as it offers less analytics relevant to meetings, revenue and pipeline generation.
Jifflenow, however, makes it easy to track meeting metrics through comprehensive dashboards and on-demand reports. With Salesforce integration, users can even add crucial account and opportunity data to meeting requests, ensuring participants have all the contextual information they need to succeed. Analyze data and establish your meetings’ impact on influencing revenue, event ROI and other key performance indicators.
4. SuperSaaS
SuperSaaS is a flexible online appointment scheduling software made to fit the needs of almost any business. It offers a free plan for small business users, Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar integration and payment processing capabilities.
Features
As an automated solution, SuperSaaS helps companies simplify online scheduling. It’s highly customizable, allowing users to craft their own custom messages, notifications, intake forms, text fields and more. It supports a range of meeting types, including 1:1 engagements, group meetings and internal huddles. Users can send SMS confirmations, email reminders and follow-up messages from the same interface.
Use case
SuperSaaS is designed as a one-size-fits-all solution with use cases ranging from health and wellness to education and public service. Despite casting a wide net, its platform ultimately misses many of an enterprise’s key requirements.
Take security, for instance. SuperSaaS offers some data security protections, such as basic encryption and access control, but enterprise clients often demand much more. That’s why Jifflenow implements an array of sophisticated cybersecurity measures, including firewall protection, anti-malware software, rigorous testing, multi-factor authentication and continuous monitoring. These safeguards, among many more, defend against threats that could jeopardize your company’s most valuable assets.
5. Timetap
Timetap’s automated appointment scheduler offers a level of flexibility you don’t often see in most online booking platforms. It allows you to easily manage and book appointments for multiple users across several locations, thereby saving time and reducing repetitive work.
Features
One of Timetap’s more interesting capabilities is its automated waitlist tool. This feature allows you to create a waitlist and automatically send meeting requests when registrants cancel or a seat becomes available. The platform also offers a travel time calculator, which measures the commute between appointments held in different locations. Additionally, Timetap users can schedule appointments across multi-day programs, such as seminars and classes.
Use case
Timetap has many features that could be useful at the enterprise level, but is best suited for smaller use cases, such as education or retail applications. As an automation solution, Timetap certainly simplifies the meeting scheduling workflow, though not to the extent that event teams require.
Marketers and sales reps must accommodate walk-in attendees on the trade show floor. It’s essential that their scheduling app facilitates a seamless walk-in experience and enables team members to instantly identify the most optimal experts for their interests.
Jifflenow offers this capability on an enterprise scale. Our agile platform can accommodate a high volume of inbound and outbound meetings. This is important for field marketers who may be booking hundreds of engagements throughout an event, including pre-scheduled, real-time and walk-in participants.
6. Acuity Scheduling
Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace scheduling platform, is primarily focused on helping users replace multiple administrative systems with a single cloud-based booking software. Its functionality goes beyond online scheduling and into accounting and client database management.
Features
Acuity Scheduling customers can book and reschedule appointments by browsing staff availability, which can be linked through social media or the company website. The platform automatically syncs calendars across multiple time zones, ensuring you can meet with international clients without running into issues.
Acuity users also can send customized communications to clients and prospects that reflect their specific branding. This tool also allows you to send appointment reminders via email and text.
Use case
Altogether, Acuity is a user-friendly scheduling app that makes booking classes, workshops and group appointments a breeze. Its comprehensive feature set, which includes online payment integration, is perfect for teams that want to upsell customers on additional services.
However, this particular app falls short of the mark for field marketing-driven scheduling. Events are massive investments, which is why marketers aim to pre-book as many attendees as possible before it kicks off. Acuity Scheduling doesn’t support this must-have feature, rendering it unfit for the field marketing workflow.
By contrast, eEvent allows you to seamlessly pre-program your upcoming trade shows and conferences. You can schedule strategic engagements well in advance through inbound meeting requests or outbound bookings. Not only does this help you maximize your sales opportunities, but it also enables you to ensure the right experts and executives are at the event.
7. Setmore
Setmore is a scheduling tool that assigns a unique subdomain for your business — a customizable website where clients can visit and book appointments. Moreover, you can tailor the booking page to your brand and collect online payments.
Features
This scheduling app offers both a free plan and several paid plans to meet your individual needs. Design a custom booking page to display your services and real-time availability, complete with your logo, branding, reviews and more. Users can generate a QR code to place on marketing, merchandise and other resources, which links straight to your scheduling site.
Use case
Setmore is a great option for small businesses and freelancers, such as those in the health and fitness industry. However, the platform does little to support enterprise requirements.
For instance, Setmore doesn’t allow customers to request meetings based on type. On the other hand, Jifflenow’s inbound request pages can be tailored to your specific engagement needs. Offer product demos, meet-the-expert sessions, executive meetings and more — all mapped to the locations, topics and stakeholders most relevant to the request. Deliver the most optimal meeting experience possible to nurture your prospects and seal the deal.
8. Square Appointments
Square Appointments is created by Square, a popular online payment processing company. Its primary purpose is to simplify and accelerate the appointment scheduling process, thus giving you time back to focus on other important business matters.
Features
Square Appointments helps clients book, cancel and reschedule appointments. It frees you from having to manage this process manually by offering customers user-friendly self-service capabilities. From a management perspective, you can view the history of your customers’ past visits to better understand trends and behaviors. Although a free plan is available, the platform’s paid plans provide more robust functionality for unlimited bookings, staff members and more.
Use case
This software’s features are undoubtedly best suited for small businesses, especially in the health and beauty industry. For example, salon owners can charge late cancellation and no-show fees for customers who miss their appointments.
It’s a perfect solution for businesses hoping to manage clients, accept payments and control calendars in just one pane of glass. However, it’s not scalable to the degree enterprises expect. Alternatively, a platform like Jifflenow can handle hundreds or thousands of appointments simultaneously.
9. vCita
vCita Online Scheduling is a self-service application for scheduling and managing appointments. It’s integrated into the vCita business management suite, which includes CRM, billing, client management and email marketing tools.
Features
This scheduling app allows your customers to schedule appointments 24/7 from your website, Facebook page, email and more. Clients can choose the type of meeting they want, whether it be virtual, in person or over the phone. Calendars automatically adjust across time zones, helping you avoid no-shows and missed appointments.
Use case
vCita is primarily targeted toward accountants, consultants, coaches, counselors, fitness trainers, lawyers and small health care providers. Its tools may be helpful for professionals managing a limited number of bookings, but don’t translate to large-scale scheduling.
Appointment booking is exceptionally complicated at the enterprise level. The workflow involves many steps and procedures that must be coordinated precisely. Simply put, teams can’t afford avoidable mistakes when multi-million dollar deals are on the line. That’s why Jifflenow breaks down the process into simplified pieces, empowering all stakeholders to fulfill their roles as seamlessly as possible.
10. Appointy
Appointy’s online scheduling software is designed to cut down on administrative work, simplify workflow management and boost productivity. It markets itself toward a variety of industries, including health and wellness, education, government and professional services.
Features
Appointy allows you to book appointments and manage multiple participants and virtual calendars easily. It automates registrations, allowing you to focus on other value-driving activities key to your specific business initiative.
Use case
The downside with Appointy’s scheduling app is that most plans — even paid versions — display ads on the interface. Only the most expensive premium plan removes all Appointy branding, giving you the freedom to fully customize the user experience.
The platform doesn’t offer any enterprise-grade scheduling capabilities, such as robust customer analytics or automatic meeting approvals. In contrast, Jifflenow streamlines all three stages of the meeting lifecycle, empowering teams to book, manage and analyze meetings in one centralized dashboard.
Access the power of meeting scheduling automation
Overcome the vast complexities of your meeting scheduling process and start booking more customer engagements with a solution that actually aligns with your specific business goals.
Jifflenow’s robust meeting scheduling automation platform doesn’t just simplify the workflow — it amplifies it. With our software, enterprises like yours can:
- Map inbound and outbound requests to specific meeting types, locations, experts and topics of interest.
- Accelerate the sales cycle with workflow automation from start to finish.
- Analyze meeting data for improved resource utilization, business performance and continuous improvement.
- Advance your goals, drive long-term growth and impact revenue.
Ready to get started? Request a demo today.
