Finding a time that suits everyone to schedule a call or meeting can get quite messy. Calendly brings simplicity back to scheduling, by handling your availability with others with only a few clicks of a button from yourself.
With over a million monthly users, Calendly is trusted by LinkedIn and Zendesk, and is widely used by all kinds of professionals in order to make their day a little bit more manageable.
Who’s it for?
- Recruiters
- HR Managers
- Employers
- Freelancers
- Small and medium-sized enterprises
Features
I’ll just take you through how simple Calendly really is, in doing so I will guide you through the whole process from beginning to end:
1. After you have created an account, you arrive at your Dashboard where you will find the events that have been scheduled for you. If you head to the ‘Event Types’ at the top of your screen you can decide what length of meeting you want your clients/candidates to be able to choose from.
2. Once done you can share the link that has been provided to you based on your account, and prospective candidates and clients will be able to choose how long they want to meet you for (15, 30, or 60).
3. Say they have chosen 30 minutes, they will then be guided to decide what day they want to meet you.
4. They select Monday, for example, then are able to choose from all your available timings on that day. If any time has already been taken on your calendar, then it naturally does not show up as a choice.
5. Once they have picked a time, all they then need to do is fill out their name and email address, and voila, the event has been scheduled.
6. Which is then sent directly to your own email address as a notification, and added to your calendar as well.
Benefits
It really does remove the hassle of going back and forth with a client, candidate or co-worker. It handles the whole scheduling process, and all you need to do is check your schedule on that day to see what’s in store for you.
I’m a fan of its simplicity because it means you don’t have to be the most tech-savvy person out there. Calendly is easily integrated with all the popular email services such as Gmail, Office 365 and Outlook. It even checks if anything else is scheduled in that time for you and avoids double-booking you.
Notably, Calendly also integrates well with Slack, MailChimp, Salesforce, and Zapier. So it can come in handy in a number of integral work processes.
Problems
These are the main problems I faced during my time using Calendly, and these issues can be user-specific only:
- The free options can be quite limited as you can only choose one sort of event (15 min, 30 min, 60 min) to schedule.
- They have not yet developed a mobile version of the application, which is a huge drawback for someone like me who likes to work on the go.
- When booking time slots for myself it did not take into account ‘Reminders’ that I had in my Gmail, and that caused a few issues such as rescheduling with clients.
Results
Based on my use of Calendly for the past month, for the primary use of scheduling meetings and calls with clients, I can say that these were my key findings:
- Significant reduction in time spent planning or scheduling meetings
- Decreased re-scheduling rates from clients
- More free time to spend on other business relations
Price
You can create a free basic account which I found can be useful, but there is a choice between a Basic, Premium and Pro account, of which you can find the breakdown in benefits here.
If you’ve purchased Calendly we’d love to know if it has been worth your money! We’re sure other readers would appreciate it as well.
Rating
I genuinely liked the product and it did free up time for me to do other things, but I’m not sure I would pay a monthly premium for it. It in many ways depends on the type of job you have.
There were a few problems I came across which caused me to give it a 4-star rating, but Calendly is simple and unintrusive enough that almost all professionals would find it useful to some degree.
