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As a small business owner, this may sound familiar to you. A client contacts you to schedule an appointment, but then the client calls to cancel and reschedule the appointment. After the appointment, you must then contact the client to arrange for payment.
“It can be chaotic,” says Anish Mathew, product manager for Zoho Bookings. “Using Zoho Bookings, the client can book, reschedule, pay and more, and the business owner gets more time to work on helping the business grow.”
Zoho is now revamping its pricing plan for the product, to better serve solopreneurs. See below for details.
Zoho Bookings Since Launch in 2020
Since the launch, using Zoho Bookings, more than 10,000 users have scheduled more than 1.5 million appointments.
Many of the businesses thriving with Zoho Bookings are service oriented, with businesses that depend on scheduling.
“You don’t miss anything,” Mathew says. “You can set reminders and notifications before the appointment, using whatever method you choose, SMS or email.
“You can sync calendars, such as business and personal calendars,” he adds. “So, there are no double bookings.”
Some service providers, in particular, have flourished since starting to use Zoho Bookings. They include consultants, wellness coaches, freelancers, home contractors, tutors and health care professionals.
How does Zoho Bookings work?
Zoho Bookings can meet the needs of service businesses with its variety of options for scheduling appointments.
Businesses that require an in-person visit, like a plumber or electrician, can use Zoho Bookings just like a wellness coach, who can schedule a lot of virtual visits with clients. Businesses that use this platform can allow customers to choose which type of visit they need.
When an appointment is booked, the client can choose to meet by video call, phone call, or in person. The client has a space to enter comments.
If a client is booking an appointment with a business which offers multiple services, for example a holistic healing center, the client can use a menu to choose from various services, such as nutrition counseling.
Reduced Pricing Offered from Zoho Bookings
Mathew says new pricing for Zoho Bookings more affordable to make it a smart expense for solopreneurs.
Zoho Bookings is now available starting at $6 per month per staff member of a business. Premium add-ons can make it up to $9.
Zoho Bookings also offers a free plan which features:
- Unlimited customers, services, and appointments.
- One-on-one meetings.
- Online Meeting integration.
- Two-way calendar sync – Zoho, Google, O365/Outlook.com.
- Automatic confirmation, reminder, and cancelation emails.
- Mobile apps for admin and staff.
- Automatic time zone conversion for customers.
- Ability to add custom fields to booking form.
- Buffer times.
- Embed the booking page on your website.
- Rescheduling and cancellation windows
Previously, Zoho Bookings cost $20 a month for businesses with 4 to 10 staff members and $60 for businesses with 10 or more staff members.
The Benefits of Zoho Bookings
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using Zoho Bookings for your business.
Personalization
Business owners can customize templates of bookings pages, such as adding in a photo or your employees or a company logo.
Time Zones
Zoho Bookings automatically calculates time zone differences when appointments are scheduled.
Calendar Syncing
Zoho Bookings can be synced with personal calendars using integrations with Google, Microsoft and other Zoho products such as Zoho Flow.
Third-party Integration
Zoho Bookings can integrate with third-party platforms and apps like PayPal and Stripe for accepting payments from clients, to workflow management apps like Zoho Flow, Assist, and other CRM apps, to automation apps like Zapier and more.
How Will Zoho Bookings Work for Your Business?
You can choose from a menu of Zoho Bookings features, using the ones that most apply to how your business operates.
One example is with how appointments you book with Zoho Bookings are managed. You can choose the Appointment Allocation feature and have visits automatically assigned to one of your service providers.
“Using Appointment Allocation, Zoho Bookings can automatically assign requests for appointments,” Mathew explains. “That way appointments can be equally allocated among workers.”
If you don’t want to do things that way, you simply make Appointment Allocation inactive and manually assign appointments.
The Calendar Overview feature allows you to look at all the appointments and bookings your company currently has active.
Using Calendar Overview, you can simultaneously look at three different business locations (even in different countries). Within Calendar Overview, you can look at the locations, the appointments, and which staff members are covering the appointments.
Mathew says the goal with Zoho Bookings is to create simple, one-click scheduling but the product is extremely customizable for the particular needs of any business.
“We want to go deeper into scheduling, and solve problems for small businesses,” he says.
This article, “How Zoho Bookings Helps Your Business Grow” was first published on Small Business Trends
