What Are The 6 Biggest Benefits of a Scheduling Integration?

Online booking has been part of the standard online experience, for services like airplane tickets and car rentals. In the past few years, spurred by COVID-19, we have begun booking many other services: haircuts, doctor appointments, cleaning, co-working spaces, and other amenities. 

In this article, we will discuss some of the main reasons you would want to integrate a scheduling workflow into your application, and how you and your end-users will benefit.

Why should you integrate scheduling API?

There are a number of reasons why one might want to integrate scheduling into their product. In this article, we will cover three main reasons which benefit the end-user of your product and three reasons related to your company’s performance and its bottom line. Let’s look into each side of the equation in detail.

How scheduling integration will benefit the end-user? 

1. Improve user experience.
   Allow customers to book appointments online instead of only calling during business hours, emailing back and forth, or, worse: waiting in line. If you can implement a booking workflow, you could reduce your need for secretarial admin work because calendars will populate with reservations automatically. One of the unseen benefits of this workflow automation is that client information is reliably collected and stored in connection with your customer profiles. In today’s business environment, online scheduling systems are almost a standard workflow for many modern businesses and is rapidly expanding to most service providers, especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use online booking too! 🙄
   

2. Modernize end-users workflow.
   Let end-users focus on their job while OnSched automatically populates their calendars with appointments, handles rescheduling, cancelations, and reminders. In a few years, scheduling will become another standard feature for any online service platform and it’s time to adopt new practices so that your customers don’t leave you behind.

3. Automate routine processes for your customers.
   This is especially relevant if you serve businesses with sizeable offline operations - let customers book cleaning services or math tutors (for instance) every Sunday for the next few months. As a business’ list of demands grows, the need to become predictable and reliable will let your customers worry less about scheduling and staff’s availability.

How scheduling API integration will benefit your company? 

1. Capture revenue by offering scheduling features as a paid add-on.
   Implementing scheduling will allow you to generate extra revenue by selling it as an add-on to your services or a part of your premium package to capture revenue previously paid to a third party. It’s easy to upsell users on a feature they are already paying money for to a different provider. Give your customers what they need, all in one place with one single bill.

2. Improve customer retention by offering an all-in-one solution.
   Having a universal tool is always better than switching between tabs and apps. OnSched is white-labeled and offers a single sign-on (SSO), so your users will never know what’s hiding behind the booking user interface or experience any brand misalignment. All-in-one solutions make the end-user’s life easier, lead to a significant increase in productivity, and simplify your tech-stack management, which is especially attractive and makes the buy decision easier.

3. Stay ahead of the competition.
   The vendor who checks all the boxes will always have an advantage and often have a shorter deal cycle, so it’s beneficial to be able to address all of your customer’s needs. Innovative companies quickly expand into offering related services to easily upsell to their existing customers and lock users in their platform. It also leads to a higher quality integration and higher end-user productivity.

The takeaway

Integrating scheduling functionality into your product might sound like a demanding project, however, with tools like OnSched.js and a truly technical support team you could build a proof of concept in minutes and a minimum viable product in just days. Considering all of the benefits outlined in this article and the ease of integration, the return on investment shouldn’t keep you waiting. With millions of appointments made each month, we can say that online booking has reached mass adoption and will only expand from here until it is standardized.

How to get access to the OnSched API?

We love to guide our customers through the platform the first time they sign up. So: in order to gain free trial access to the OnSched API, book an intro call with our specialist. We promise it’s pressure-free 😉

1. Book an intro call & get your sandbox API keys.

2. Thoughtfully test the API for all of your user flows.

3. Request production server API keys when ready to go live.

If you have any questions about the OnSched API, we encourage you to book an intro call even if it’s not on your immediate roadmap - let's plan for the future!