Iris Works is an all-inclusive cloud based studio management system built for photographers by photographers. It focuses on being easy to use, set up, and manage, giving photographers more time to let their creativity run free.

Photographers are often small-business owners who have to juggle between their photography work and growing their business with their personal life. Therefore, being able to manage all commitments from one place and having an online scheduling tool that allows them to share their availability is important.

Iris Works’ system provides calendar management for photographers’ sessions. Usually photographers offer different types of sessions, for example family sessions, newborn sessions, or wedding sessions.

Within Iris Works, users can have a different calendar associated to each type of session they provide. They can also choose a customizable workflow for each calendar that will kick start once a booking is made. The workflow includes sending quotes, confirmation emails, contracts, and invoices to customers.

The Challenge

Iris Works is committed to helping their users maximize their time, grow their customer base, and increase revenue. So, when users requested an online scheduling component to be added to the system, the company looked into how it could be achieved.

Sharing calendar availability and giving customers the power to book appointments online drastically decreases the time business owners have to spend on repetitive admin tasks. It gives them more time to focus on their work and on growing their businesses. It also increases customer satisfaction by enabling them to book suitable time slots in just a few clicks.

While many systems on the market use a third-party scheduling system, Iris Works wanted to build it in-house. They were looking to offer their users and their users’ customers a seamless process so that when a booking is made, the associated workflow is automatically triggered without the photographer having to switch applications.

Iris Works’ development team looked for a scheduling API that wouldn’t force them to spend time and resources building a different calendar integration for each calendar service. That’s how they found Cronofy. They then started testing our standardized calendar API, which allows developers to sync their software to all major calendar services.

The Solution

Cronofy exists to solve all scheduling challenges, and that includes helping organizations provide a better online booking experience to everyone.

Our Availability API was a perfect fit for Iris Works’ needs and the integration happened seamlessly.

This integration means that photographers who use Iris Works can now connect their personal calendars and share their availability with the platform through Cronofy.
They can share their calendar’s availability on their websites, social media accounts, in emails, and text messages.

When a slot is booked via Iris Works – whether that’s on a website, via text message, or by email – that event is automatically added to the connected person’s calendars. The opposite is also true. If an event is added to the person’s calendar, that event will be reflected in real-time in all the calendars in Iris Works.

This also means that when a slot has been booked, it will no longer be shown for booking to anyone else. Everything happens in real-time, so the risk of double bookings or missing appointments is gone.

If photographers don’t know their schedules ahead of time, they can also choose to select a few available dates to send customers in a booking link on a case-by-case basis.

Iris Works users can now manage all their commitments from one place, and they can allow customers to book online. This helps them to reduce their admin burdens, giving them more time to focus on providing high-quality work to their customers and growing their business.

Since using our Availability API and adding real-time scheduling to their offering, the team at Iris Works have registered an increase in conversion rates from free trials to paid customers by 5% per month.

Give your users the right calendar management tools

The Cronofy Scheduling APIs allow you to add scheduling tools that work with all major calendar providers to your software. This saves your users time they’d otherwise have spent on admin tasks and allows them to maximize their working hours.

If you’re a developer, you can create a free account to try our API for free and see what features you could build.

If you’re a product owner, or just generally interested in learning more about Cronofy and how clients use our service, please get in touch today.