Finding the right time to meet with someone else can be so frustrating, all of the back and forth communication, finding an opening, finding the ideal time for you and others to meet.
Well in today's video I wanna share with you five of my favorite meeting schedulers to help make booking your next meeting so much easier.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And today I'm handing out a few awards in the following five categories, we're gonna look at everything from best public meeting scheduler, to best Gmail plugin, all the way to something extra special that uses artificial intelligence.
Public Meeting Scheduler
But let's get things kicked off right now, and we're gonna start with Calendly, my pick for the best public meeting scheduler.
So what exactly do I mean by that? Well I think the graphic that Calendly has on its homepage is very fitting. This is exactly what we're trying to avoid, all of this back and forth. Can you meet at this time? No, how about this? No, that doesn't work for me. Well, I can't meet on this date. Back and forth and back and forth it goes.
So what does Calendly do? Well, it does a number of things but what I think Calendly does best is it allows you to set up a few simple rules, you tell Calendly when you are available and it will allow you to share that time, either via link, via embedding it into your website. And that probably where you've seen or even used Calendly before, is where you've gone to someone's website and they say, "Yeah, I'd love to talk, want to set up a meeting with me, just click this link and I'll share with you my availability."
And of course, the great thing with this tool, and many of the others that we're looking at today, is that it will adjust the time zone accordingly. It doesn't matter where the other person is in the world, they can view it in their own local time zone. So this is ideal for coaches, this is ideal if you want to start a conversation. Maybe this is the first part of your sales funnel, and you want to allow people to book their own time. Again, dependent on your own rules. You tell it what hours or what days of the week that you would like to be available and Calendly makes it so much easier.
But maybe you need something with a few more features. Let's take a look next at Doodle, and Doodle, I'm gonna give the award for best group meeting scheduler.
You can see what I mean right here from this opening image on the Doodle website. Here you can see a variety of people have had the opportunity to vote for the days of the weeks or the times they would like to schedule a meeting together, and Doodle helps you find that out and then book the meeting for you. So this is ideal for those of you who maybe are working with a small team, whether you want to use this internally, or you can do it with other members externally, as well. If you want to give a variety of people an option to vote or select the ideal time.
So again, I think Doodle is best when you're working with multiple people, right, these are meetings with more than just the two of you, more than just yourself and one other person that you can allow them to schedule things and communicate that across multiple individuals.
Alright, next on my list is something I use personally, each and every day, and in fact, I would say that Assistant.to has become a pretty strategic, a pretty central component of my own business. And I'm gonna give Assistant.to the award for best Gmail plugin.
Now it is only for Gmail at this point in time, but the great thing is that it's free. And I don't just mean free to try, I mean absolutely free.
So how does Assistant.to work? Well as you can see from this screenshot here, in each and every one of your emails, once you install the Assistant plugin you're gonna see this little icon in the bottom right-hand corner of every email that you compose. And if you'd like to give the recipient some options as to when you can meet, you just simply select this little icon, and it's gonna allow you to pick the days of the week, the times that you would possibly like to meet with that individual.
And as you can see here, now this is just an example, there's quite a few times here in this three-day stretch, you can pick as many or as few as you like, and then the user receives this in their email and all they have to do is select which one that works for them. And that's the final step, it immediately books a meeting on your calendar and also their calendar. The only thing you have to do next is show up for the meeting.
You can include meeting details and just like we've seen before with Doodle and Calendly, you can view this in your own time zone, so it makes it very easy, very convenient for the user. One last thing I'll point out here with Assistant.to is that if none of these times work they can either say, show more times or say none of these times work, and offer their own suggestions. So they don't even have to have Assistant.to installed or be a user it can provide you with additional suggestions.
This has been again, very crucial for my own business, it's something that I use on a daily basis. Ideal for one-on-one meetings, although it can be used with multiple users, as well.
Now, maybe you need something a little more full-featured
Cutie Scheduling
than what we've seen so far, so the next award I'm gonna hand out here is for the best scheduler that also has a variety of payment options.
And for that title, I have to give it to Acuity Scheduling. Now Acuity has many of the same features that we've seen already with Calendly and Doodle. A lot of these features, in terms of one-touch scheduling, and appointment, and reducing "the drudgery," as Acuity says here, of going back and forth between individuals, but I think where Acuity stands out a little bit more than its competitors is the variety of additional features that it has.
And one of them has to do with payments. In fact, you can see here that you can sell gift certificates, subscriptions, set up packages, and even memberships within the Acuity system. Now you can accept payments with some of the other tools that we've already seen including Calendly and Doodle, but Acuity just gives you so many more options.
So if you need a few more advanced options, it also gives you a little more customization as well, within the interface, so if you need to match your website, match your branding, etc., Acuity does a very good job for that as well. So if you're needing something a little more full-featured you might be looking at Acuity.
Xdot AI
Now last but not least, I've maybe saved something very special for the end here, and that is making use of artificial intelligence.
And you're going to remember this one because it's right in the domain name, X.ai. It might be one of the shortest domains you've ever come across, X.ai. And I'd have to agree with them, that scheduling does suck. But they've done something pretty unique to help you avoid meetings being such a distraction, and such a time suck as you go back and forth with your prospective attendees.
So X.ai is artificial intelligence, and one of the bonuses of X.ai is that you can use it across multiple areas, so not just in email but you can use it within Slack. You can use it on your web page, we've seen that before as well, and of course it syncs with your calendar as well. But I know a number of you are Slack users, and that's the nice thing is that this does integrate directly with Slack, as well.
So how does it work? I'm gonna click on this little link here because there's a really good example that I think explains how it works. So here's a trial, or sorry, a hypothetical email here, and you've got sort of a back and forth going on that yes I'd like to set up a meeting. Well what X.ai does is that it has two AI assistants here and the default one is Amy. You can see that it's bolded here. So Anita, in this example, is a real person, right? I'm chatting or this person is chatting with Anita. I'd like to set up a meeting, and at the end of the email, he CCs amy@x.ai and says, "Amy, please schedule a 20-minute phone call with Anita sometime next week, and title it this, I'll call her."
Now again, this is just bolded so you can see the key points you do not have to bold this in your email, you can just write it naturally, right. You can say schedule a meeting next Monday with Anita, you don't have to say what the title is, that's not necessary, but they've decided to include it here as well. And again, Anita, this is the real person, has no idea that Amy is actually just artificial intelligence, it's not this person's assistant or secretary, but it might make you look like you've got a secretary or an assistant even if you don't have so as well.
So let's go on to step two here. So on step two, the person replies and says, or this is sorry, this is Amy now, this is the AI saying, "Hi, Anita, happy to find a time for you, will this work? But you know, Tyrik is also available at this time, what's the best number for him to call you at?"
And in step three the real person, remember this is Anita, says, "Oh, Tuesday at 2:00 works for me and my number is this." The very next step, Amy the AI agent, creates the calendar for both of you.
So from this first email nothing else was done from the originator, right, from Tyrik in this example. Nothing else was done, he let Amy, his artificial intelligence assistant, take care of everything else.
So this is maybe you could say, a little more advanced but something worth trying out, something that might pique your interest if you want an assistant to help you out schedule your meetings.
Well with that I would love to hear from you, number one do you use a meeting scheduler, and if so did I leave something off of this list? Is there something else I should have included? Maybe there's a whole other category that I should have included in this roundup of my top five.
Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you give this video a big thumbs up. Be sure to subscribe right here to Simpletivity and be sure to leave me a comment down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact, it's very simple.
