6 reasons to use Zoho Bookings to book meetings

Have you ever wanted a single platform which can take care of your customer bookings? You may or may not have a secretary in your organisation but you don’t need one. Zoho Bookings is a powerful platform which allows you to manage bookings, clients, payments and much more in a single well-bundled platform. 

There are also many different customisations you can make in the Zoho Bookings platform. Here are 6 reasons why you should consider using Zoho Bookings to manage your meetings and organise times to meet your customers.

1. View the calendar and manage bookings

Starting off with a fairly obvious point, the default home page in Zoho Bookings will show you a calendar with you and all your staff and scheduled appointments. You will get the bookings in a boxed form for a specific date and time. 

You can simply click on the booking to manage it or reschedule with your customer. You can view it on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Reports are also available to analyze your bookings and you can also manage your customers and personal profile.

2. Get instantly notified when a meeting is booked

When a meeting is booked through the web page, you will instantly be notified via email or SMS about it. SMS takes a few extra steps to configure. You can also configure the Zoho Bookings application to give you a reminder about the meeting whenever you wish. 

Notifications are available for many different actions. When a customer books a meeting with you or your staff, when a payment is made or when a customer is added to your list are some examples of when you will get notified. You can set reminder rules based on any of these actions.

3. Integration with Calendar and third-party apps

You can also integrate your Zoho Bookings application with many other applications. You can choose to configure your meetings in an external calendar such as Google calendar if you wish. To enable SMS alerts, you’ll need to integrate with a supported SMS provider. If you use Zoho CRM, you can also integrate your bookings with your CRM records.

4. Collect Payments before booking

It is also possible to collect payments before, during or after a booking. In case you have a service fee or a consulting fee, you can enable payments on your Zoho Bookings URL. Payment gateways such as Paypal, Stripe, Razorpay, Forte, Authorize.net and Worldpay are supported in Zoho Bookings.

5. Customise booking times and office hours

You can also customise the timings on your Zoho Bookings portal. If you don’t work weekends or after 6 PM, you can choose to avoid taking any bookings on those slots. You can also choose to add special hours or out of office hours in your booking with a fee if you wish.

You can set these hours for yourself or your staff. You can also choose to set how far out you allow bookings (for example, a month in advance but not more).

6. Customise services, booking page URL, embed as a widget and more

You can choose to customise the design of your booking page, the different services you have to offer, customise your booking page URL and more. You can embed it as a widget on your website. You can also customise workflow rules and notifications as you wish when a booking is made. So Zoho Bookings offers you with some flexibility in design and proceedings as it fits your business.

How we use Zoho Bookings at SyncEzy

At SyncEzy, we take bookings on our portal https://book.syncezy.com/. Here, we allow our customers to choose a date and time of their choosing with whoever they wish to speak to. After a slot is chosen, we collect their contact information and a small consulting fee before we book the meeting slot with them. Our slots are usually for 30 minutes or 60 minutes.

Internally, we also have our own calendars and workflow rules set up to notify us and update our Zoho CRM with details so that we are always on top of our reserved meetings and don’t miss out on anything our customers wish.

Conclusion

Zoho Bookings is a great tool that you can give your customers to book meetings with you. There is no advanced IT knowledge required to set it up and all the setups are very simple to do and follow. Automating your bookings is very helpful, especially if you are in a busy environment where it is hard to keep track of these things. 

Consider using Zoho Bookings if you need to book meetings in advance with customers or if you want to book them yourself. There are many advanced integrations available and if you ever need help, please feel free to contact SyncEzy to help you with your setup.