MDA Leadership Consulting was founded in 1981 with a mission to help organizations identify the right talent to drive results, accelerate the development at all levels of the leadership pipeline, and sharpen alignment between talent and strategy. Their coaches and consultants work with companies of all sizes on a local, national and global level to identify and improve leadership performance.‍

Over the years, they’ve built a reputation as the assessment and coaching consultancy to go to for top-tier leadership assessment and development. Although they are based in the US, they provide their services virtually worldwide. They expanded more into virtual assessment and coaching particularly during the pandemic, when the majority of businesses had to shift to virtual to survive.

‍MDA set themselves apart by providing a “white glove” approach, delivering premium client service. They want to provide the best possible experience for their clients. Because of this, they look to ensure every stage of the customer journey is high quality and frictionless.

The Challenge

Given MDA is an assessment and coaching business, a large part of their function is booking meetings, whether this be interviews or business simulations, coaching sessions, consulting with clients, or internal meetings among employees. As the business has grown, so too has the volume of meetings to schedule. The business began offering more of their services virtually during the pandemic, which made them more accessible to leaders around the world. This naturally increased the number of meetings that needed to be booked.

Business increased to such a scale that the company employed a team of ten admin staff who primarily took care of organizing and scheduling meetings for consulting and coaching staff. This model was highly manual, taking employees away from doing higher-value tasks, and not as time or cost efficient as it could be. As MDA focuses so heavily on client experience, providing a “white glove” premium service, the existing stressful and time-intensive back-and-forth exchange didn’t fit their ethos.

‍The nature of working with busy leaders and executives meant they regularly had to reschedule meetings, which was proving to require a significant amount of time and effort to address the constant schedule changes. In order to maintain the same level of client service while dealing with an increased workload, they needed a better system for booking meetings.

Solution

Matthew Such was brought to MDA to improve the operational side of the business, and quickly pinpointed scheduling as a priority.

Matt needed to transform manual scheduling to a digital solution. However, a lot of the staff within the business were used to a certain way of working. MDA Leadership is generally traditional in its approach and has not been tech-focused. It was important that they found a simple-to-use solution that could be used by any of their clients or staff. As the Scheduler enables users to book meetings within just a couple of clicks, it proved to be the perfect fit for their needs.

‍MDA deals with complex booking use cases, such as assessment processes that span multiple days, changing consultants for each session, or multiple clients needing to be in one session. They needed a solution that could cater to all of these scenarios. It didn’t take them long to decide Cronofy was the best fit for their needs.

Being able to schedule on behalf of a coach or consultant was one of Matt’s main priorities when looking for an automated scheduling solution. MDA’s admin staff often have to book meetings on behalf of the consulting and coaching team, so this capability was vital to maintaining business efficiency. The Scheduler allows anyone in the same organization to schedule on behalf of another team member. Not only this, but the recipients can reschedule in just a couple of clicks if they need to, and everyone will be notified of the new meeting time.

The Results

Since MDA Leadership has started using the Cronofy Scheduler, the admin team who were previously dedicated to booking meetings have saved hours from their week, giving them more time to focus on other high-value tasks. What was previously hundreds of hours of effort a month has been cut down substantially – staff used to spend around 3 hours booking a single assessment or coaching process, whereas now it takes 15 minutes. This has made the company more efficient, helping them to deal with the increased workload that has come with their company growth.

‍Automated scheduling has improved the user experience, making it as simple as possible for these busy clients to book into assessment and coaching sessions at times that are most convenient for them. Being able to reschedule without hassle has taken away the back-and-forth headache that rescheduling would have created previously. MDA’s clients have commented on how simple it is to use the Scheduler and how much time it saves.

‍They have been able to increase the amount of business meetings and calls that can be scheduled. The new way of working has improved the consultants' day and decreased the burden of scheduling meetings.

MDA has been impressed at the level of service from the Cronofy support team, being highly responsive and available to help with the implementation process whenever necessary. They’ve been able to facilitate a smooth roll-out of the platform to around half of their staff so far.

What next?

‍There’s still a lot that MDA wants to achieve with scheduling automation. They are in the middle of rolling Cronofy’s solution out to all their lines of business and clients and will continue to do so until the whole business is using automated scheduling.

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