Software for Scheduling Appointments

I am currently working with a design build company that also has landscape maintenance and irrigation installs as an integral part of doing business.

Our office manager/receptionist is getting swamped this time of year booking appointments for both people wanting their sprinkler systems started up and people contacting the company about new landscape projects. The company has an old fashioned appointment book filled with red pen markings, cross outs, and it's hefty and only the office manager knows what's up to date and they are the only one allowed to make any additions and changes.

Our company is small and every single one of us answers the phones. But since the calendar is centralized, we must tell the potential customers that a call must be returned in order to set an appointment. This causes a backlog for our office manager that delays her other duties and turns off clients. My boss can set his own appointments for landscape design clients, but everything else must go through the office manager.

I'm looking for recommendations for software that would allow multiple people to see schedules and set appointments with the pertinent contact information. Our office has both PCs and Macs, so the most efficient for everybody would be an online service, I assume. Our office manager handles Peachtree Accounting daily, but I also want to be sure that the software is user-friendly; maybe color coding different kinds of appointment capability?

Tags: appointments, calendar, scheduling, software

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Permalink Reply by Chris Whitted on May 16, 2012 at 1:04pm

I've typically used Outlook in the past for the sharing of and managing joint calenders, but while it is available for Macs it would require an Exchange server - in short some expense and permissions configuration / management depending on what you already have. One place used Google Calender instead, but I never used it extensively. Without going through the plethora of search results for 'multi-user appointment scheduler or calender', I'd say Google was probably your best option.

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Permalink Reply by Russell MacDonald on May 16, 2012 at 1:30pm

This would work well.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx#fbid=...

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Permalink Reply by Jamie Chen on May 18, 2012 at 10:22am

Thanks for the suggestions.

I'm still researching and I think something more CRM instead of a basic address book is needed. We need more detail than just basic contact info; who is a regular maintenance customer, who has spent over x amount of dollars with us and is therefore more lucrative and loyal. A way to tag them, pull up the tags quickly to make a mailing list, and then send out invites to call early for appointments.

(And with tagging, maybe a way to do something special like x dollars off the next service for referrals or some other customer loyalty program.)