A Sensible Approach to Scheduling
Posted by Josh Trubow on September 20, 2018
At Sensible Financial, we strive to make it easier for you to work with us. We know that scheduling meetings and phone calls has been a major pain point, requiring a lot of telephone and email back and forth. We are pleased to announce that we have upgraded our old-school methods to Calendly, a user-friendly and time-saving software solution.
Calendly enables you to schedule appointments directly with individuals or teams at Sensible Financial. You receive real-time access to our calendars and can select the time that is most convenient for you. You can also book phone calls with members of your Sensible team. Here’s what you’d see if you used Calendly to set up a call with me:
I have times available on the dates circled in blue. Clicking on the date will allow you to select a time.
Choosing a time brings you to a page where you can enter details about the appointment.
Entering your information into the available fields and clicking “Schedule Event” will reserve your meeting time on our calendars.
The information we ask for on this page depends on the meeting type. If we will be presenting information, you can indicate whether you’d like to meet in our office in Waltham or remotely via screen share and phone audio.
We’ve seen many benefits since we started using Calendly, including:
- No more telephone or email tag. You save time because you have you direct access to our availability.
- We can offer you more options. We used to propose 2-4 specific times and go back and forth to finalize. You now have access to more choices.
- Calendly is time-zone intelligent. Regardless of where you live, Calendly automatically recognizes the local-time zone on your device and will offer you meetings that align with our availability.
- Calendar invites – You’ll never have to remember which date and time you chose for your meeting. Calendly automatically sends you an invitation email that you can add to your Google, Outlook, Office 365, or iCloud calendar.
- Easy rescheduling if a conflict arises. Your Calendly invitation includes a link to cancel or reschedule your appointment. If something comes up and you need to reschedule, just click the link and choose a new time.
Calendly does have a few limitations, and we’ve developed work-arounds to address most of them:
- Manual scheduling may be necessary if you can’t find a good option. Calendly can’t rearrange our calendars to accommodate a meeting. Internal meetings may limit the times that Calendly can offer to you. We may be able to reschedule these meetings to free up availability. If you would like to meet sooner than Calendly’s earliest available appointment, please check with your advisor to see if they can find a mutually convenient time the old-fashioned way.
- Our calendars disconnect occasionally. Due to our cyber-security policies, our Calendly connection occasionally disconnects until we re-authenticate. When this happens, our calendars will be temporarily unavailable, and any scheduling links will not be accessible. If this occurs over a weekend or a vacation, we ask for your patience, as it may take a little time before we can re-connect. We’re generally able to re-connect the same day during normal business hours.
In our initial testing, we’ve found that the benefits of using Calendly have outweighed the few drawbacks. We are rolling out this service now and intend to offer it to help you schedule most of your future meetings.
For annual reviews, we will remind you via email that your review month is approaching and include a link to schedule a meeting. Our email signatures now include a link to schedule a phone call. You can also schedule a phone meeting by clicking your advisor’s link on the “Sensible People” section of our website.
We hope you will find that Calendly is convenient and saves you time, and we look forward to your feedback and suggestions.