Offering scheduling as a service

One of the Cronofy API’s most popular uses is enabling companies to provide great scheduling services. For example, if your business involves your customers or staff having to arrange meetings, appointments, events, or activities of any kind, making your scheduling service as streamlined as possible is essential.

There are two key elements at play here:

• The straightforward implementation and easy maintenance coveted by developers.
• The flexibility, reliability, ease of use, and privacy demands of end users.

Unfortunately, these rarely co-exist; there’s almost always some degree of compromise required. If you’re manually integrating with calendar APIs, then making your scheduling service flexible by allowing end users to connect their choice of (Google, Exchange, Outlook, Office 365 or Apple iCloud) calendars means compromising on developer sanity and adding to your business costs.

The good news is that it’s possible to give everyone what they want and need from their calendar integration by using the Cronofy API. The end result is that you provide online scheduling that your customers love to use and your developers love to work with.

What to consider

The specifics will come down to your own business, needs, and customers, but here’s a quick checklist of questions you may want to answer before the project starts:

• How will my staff/customers use this feature?
• What do my staff/customers want to achieve from using it?
• What do they expect to be able to do?
• What problems does it solve for them?
• What business challenges/aims does it meet?
• What do my developers want, need, and expect from this?
• How will this be implemented?
• How will it change existing services?
• How will it be maintained?
• How will it look (UX, integration with other products/services/software etc.)?

How it works in practice

By implementing the Cronofy API for your scheduling, you can offer your customers accurate calendar information with automatic, dependable syncing and better privacy straight out of the box. They can use whichever calendar provider they prefer, instantly making your offering better than your competitors’. Cronofy is also versatile enough to be integrated with your existing services and software for a seamless experience all round.

We have several clients who use Cronofy to handle the scheduling aspect of their service, including CoachLogix, a business coaching platform that helps coaches to manage their time successfully. Their scheduling service uses Cronofy to read in live availability dates and push appointments out the moment they’re made, eliminating the chance of double booking and the need for manual user management.

CoachLogix’s other Cronofy-powered benefits include:

• Reliable real-time availability information, meaning vacant slots and scheduled bookings are always up to date.
• Controlled calendar sharing, so user privacy is maintained.
• One-stop easy booking management for multiple customers.
• User-centric workflow: there’s no need for users to change how they work or the calendar provider they use.
• Automatic scheduling efficiency, with no need for manual schedule management such as editing or deleting bookings.

The end result is a fully functional scheduling system that works seamlessly as part of CoachLogix’s dependable time management service. It’s a win-win situation for both staff and customers.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can use Cronofy for your business, contact us today!