Let people effortlessly book a call with you (and make money)

Booking calls could a tedious job, in the sense that there used to be a lot of back-forth communication (messenger, email, whatsapp, …) before you even had a confirmed appointment.

Luckily these days there are multiple solutions to that.

One of my clients had multiple services she wanted to keep completely separated. Service A was running on WordPress and Service B on Wix. As the customer is the only person fulfilling both services, it’s absolutely necessary to have no double bookings. So conceptually: there is or one base calendar or there are two calendars  (one per service: being synchronized all the time).
It would be absolutely fantastic if payments were also integrated (Paypal, Stripe, Square Up, ..).
Also after the act of booking a call the requester should get emails with instructions how to optimally prepare for the call. So think in terms of email automation 😉

For a moment we looked at stand-alone solutions.  Options we took into consideration:

• Wix has some nice built-in automation: like a Booking Services / Booking Calendar / (including emails being send out: e.g. confirmed booking.). So it would be great to have this used for both services.
  So a solution might have been make a ‘hidden’ Wix page for Service A (running on WordPress)
  From the WordPress page we could point to that hidden page so people didn’t get confused about Service B
  The bis issue here was: it would be an hassle sending out an email sequence
• have EasyAppointments installed on WordPress or next to WordPress and use this as ‘stand-alone’ situation
  It’s quite nice, but it would be an hassle to make it ‘independent’.

 

Long story short: we used a Premium Service

Using a dedicated paid service gave us lots of advantages:

• support
• one calendar where both services interact with  (instead of two systems needing to synchronize => potential conflicts)
• good out-of-the-box integrations

 

There are quite some popular services out there:

• Calendly
• Book Like A Boss
• Bookme.name
• …

The one that is best suited for you depends off course on your particular needs.
Here are the things you should keep in mind:

• Calendar features
  • do you need multiple booking types (e.g. a 60 min service A booking , a 15 min service B booking , … )
• Payments
  • Which one do you need? Paypal, Stripe, Square Up, Bancontact, iDeal
• Auto responders
  • How easy  & flexible is the integration with auto responders (Mailchimp, …-
• Others
  • most of time it’s a good sign if they offer Zapier as an integration as well (to do custom automations)