How Does an Appointment Scheduling Service Work?

We get questions from small and large companies that want to know a little more information and often ask, “How does an appointment scheduling service work?” We have articles on our blog that explain how outsourcing your calls can help turn leads into scheduled appointments. In this article, we dive a little deeper into the scheduling process and you learn how your business can benefit from an appointment scheduling service.

How our Appointment Scheduling Service Works

Step 1. You Tell Us How to Answer Your Calls

Good answering service companies will have a long initial consultation with you to understand how you want your phones to be answered. Here at A Courteous Communications, we go through a questionnaire with you and customize your caller’s complete experience. We will discuss the most frequently asked questions callers ask when calling your business and train our virtual receptionists specifically on your account. Once we have all the necessary information, our in-house programmer will begin making your account in our system.

Step 2. We Synch Your Appointment Calendar with Our Free Scheduling Software

To save costs for our clients, we can use the free appointment scheduling software provided by Google Calendar. This universally used appointment scheduling software allows our telephone agents to add and remove appointments on all of our clients’ calendars with a touch of a button. Although our state of the art technology can synch up to dozens of scheduling software programs, we are a fan of Google Calendar specifically because of the following features:

• •Ability to share schedules with ease
• •Your calendar is always on the go and completely mobile
• •Event reminders provided in your inbox so you never miss an appointment
• •Capability to send invitations and track rsvp’s
• •Real time activity updates available to multiple users
• •And last but not least… it’s a FREE appointment scheduling software!

Step 3. You Forward Your Business Lines and We Schedule Your Appointments

Forwarding your calls to an appointment scheduling service can be done by anyone in your office by simply dialing the call-forwarding number we provide or by following your phone company’s simple instructions. Once your calls are forwarded to our award winning telephone agents, you can sit back and just watch the appointments start to fill up on your calendar in real time.

We will answer your business calls according to your exact specifications and will talk your customer through the process of scheduling an appointment. This includes:

• •Asking qualifying questions to your callers to confirm that an appointment is appropriate.
• •Offering pre-determined blocks of appointment times to callers and scheduling their appointment on your calendar.
• •Documenting all necessary contact information from your callers and confirming the spelling of certain names and always verifying their contact telephone information.
• •Emailing you or texting you to confirm the appointment scheduled and providing all information in one email or text for easy review.
• •Confirming your schedule on a daily basis to ensure that you never have a missed appointment with your customer.

Step 4. Delivery and Retrieval of Appointments Scheduled

Our 24 hour call center agents are able to send you immediate notifications once they have scheduled an appointment or canceled an appointment on your behalf. Here are several ways that we deliver the details of appointments scheduled to our clients and how they are able to retrieve their real time calendars anytime, anywhere.

• •Text Notifications.  A lot of our busy clients request that we notify them of their scheduled appointments via text message. This option is quick, easy and the clients that request this delivery option know that their cell phones are always within their reach.
• •Email Invites. You can choose to be notified of new scheduled appointments by having our telephone agents send you an invitation to the event via email. If you are a person that feels more comfortable with the reliability of email communications, we will email you each time an appointment has been scheduled or if an appointment has been canceled.
• •Fax Notifications. You may wonder, “Who still uses a fax machine in today’s world?” A lot of companies still prefer to have information communicated via facsimile. Fax is still very commonly used with a lot of our medical facility accounts. So if you prefer to receive a physical fax of your scheduled and canceled appointments, A Courteous Answering Service is fully equipped to keep you updated through fax transmissions 24 hours a day.
• •Phone Call Confirmation. With something as important and vital as scheduled appointments, some of our customers prefer to have a virtual receptionist phone them and advise personally that an appointment has been scheduled or canceled. Since we are a fully functioning virtual receptionist team dedicated to answering your phones, we would be more than happy to call you and let you know of any changes made to your schedule. Can’t come to the phone? No worries! Our telephone agents are trained in dispatching procedures and protocols. Rest assured that our team will keep trying to reach you until you confirm the scheduled appointment personally.

A lot of busy business owners just don’t know how easy it is to outsource their scheduling needs to a qualified and professional virtual service team. We are here to tell you that hiring virtual schedulers doesn’t have to be difficult or confusing.  

That being said, outsourcing your scheduling needs requires a lot of trust in a qualified and professional answering service. We highly recommend that you go through the same steps you would to hire an in-house receptionist. Research all answering service companies thoroughly before hiring one in particular and if you already have an answering service, make random mystery shop calls on your business lines to make sure your phones are being answered the way you would like them to be.

A trusted Appointment Scheduling Service for 30 years

A Courteous Communications was founded in 1986 and we have been an appointment scheduling service for businesses since opening our own doors in Orlando, Florida. That’s 30 years of experience and customer service that we can bring to your business today! Give us a call or send us a message and learn more about how we can take care of your appointment scheduling needs.