5 Best Practices to Reduce Double Booking in Business Appointments

Double booking in business appointments can lead to a scheduling nightmare, creating unnecessary stress for you and your clients.

Here we look at the issues caused by double booking and then  five best practices to stop it happening in your organization.

What is double booking in business appointments?

Double booking in business appointments occurs when you unintentionally schedule two meetings, calls, or appointments at the same time. As you can’t be in two different places, or be on two different calls, at the same time, this usually results in you having to reschedule with at least one client.

Miscommunication, poor calendar management, and even simply having a bad memory can all lead to double booking. In some cases, a previous appointment may run long, and because you haven’t left enough time between appointments, it ends up overlapping with your next booking.

What are the impacts of double booking?

Regardless of the causes, double booking often results in clients feeling undervalued, neglected, or downright disrespected.

While it’s an easy mistake to make, the repercussions can be far-reaching.
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Increased stress

Picture the scene. You’ve just sat down at your desk with your morning cup of coffee. You open your diary to see what’s on the agenda for the day. Suddenly, you notice that you’ve got two meetings with different clients scheduled for 10am. 

What follows is likely a mad dash around the office to see if anybody else can cover one of your meetings. If they can’t, you’re going to have to telephone one of your clients with a groveling apology. Not the best start to the morning!

Double booking adds an extra layer of stress to your job that is entirely avoidable.

Unsatisfied clients

Some clients will shrug off double booking, simply rescheduling their appointment for another time. Others, however, may not be as forgiving. 

Double booking your clients can reduce customer satisfaction, make them feel undervalued and unappreciated, and seriously harm your long-term relationship with them.

Damaged reputation

If a client feels slighted after having a meeting canceled due to double booking, they may just share their experience with their office mates and other contacts across the industry. But they may also opt to leave you a negative review online.

Decreased productivity

Double booking can impact your productivity.
​​​​​​​Without collaborative tools to improve employee productivity, time spent trying to rearrange appointments can take away from more important, higher-value tasks.

Missed opportunities

Sometimes you may have to cancel a double-booked appointment altogether. This could mean losing your only chance to work with a lucrative new client.

5 best practices to prevent double booking in business appointments

Here are five ways that you can reduce double booking in business appointments.

Keep your schedule up to date

If you make an appointment but don’t immediately enter it into your diary, it can be all too easy to forget about it. Then when you make your next appointment, you might see a free spot and book another client, even though you’ve already made arrangements for that time. 

For this reason, keeping an up-to-date schedule is crucial in avoiding double booking. Regardless of whether you work using a multi-platform calendar app, a centralized booking system, or a good old-fashioned hand-written diary, it’s important to enter appointments as quickly as possible when they’re made.

This gives you an accurate picture of how your schedule looks whenever you need to look back at it, and helps you to avoid double booking appointments. Registering appointments promptly isn’t only important for personal schedules, in fact, double bookings can become even more of an issue for larger businesses. If multiple teams across different sites aren’t made aware of a new booking immediately, staff may be working on the same slot simultaneously for no reason. 

To help businesses avoid this, smart scheduling tools often include booking slot reservation features, designed to automatically block appointment slots across shared calendars. As soon as an employee opens a slot, that period will be blocked for all users for a set amount of time, even if the employee is on a call with their client and isn’t able to input any appointment details. 

There are other tools and technologies worth considering to help you avoid double bookings. Perhaps you use a desktop calendar on your work PC, but often take business calls and make appointments while you’re at home. In this scenario, you could use remote access solutions to access your work PC and update your calendar even when you’re away from the office.

Use a centralized booking system

A centralized booking system is a tool that simplifies the process of booking appointments for you and your clients. Just as a cloud integration platform draws together data from disparate systems across a business, a centralized booking system synchronizes your various calendar apps into one unified solution.

This can be especially beneficial for businesses using CRM software for professional services. Doing this presents clients with an accurate picture of your availability, and ensures that appointments are only booked at times when you’re definitely available. This helps to prevent double booking, while also making the appointment booking process simpler for your clients.

Rather than trying to reach you on the phone or sending an email, they can use the automated system to view your availability and choose a slot that suits them. Research shows that this is the preferred appointment booking method for many people.

Clients will also receive immediate confirmation of the appointment, with the option to receive appointment reminders closer to the time.

Manually approve bookings

If you use appointment booking software to allow clients to make appointments, make sure that you customize your settings to allow you to manually approve bookings. 

Otherwise, you may find that your calendar fills up quickly without you noticing, that appointments are booked too close to one another, or that duplicate appointments are made. 

Manually checking and approving bookings as they are made will allow you to prevent this. You’ll be able to use your experience to decide whether a booking request is feasible, thinking about factors that an automated system wouldn’t take into account.

Learn to say no

There may be times when you’ve got clients trying to book appointments, but your diary is full. It can be tempting to try and squeeze everybody in regardless, but this will often lead to rushed meetings and double bookings.

It’s important to learn to say ‘no’ to your clients when necessary. In these situations, remember to:

• Be apologetic
• Be honest; clients will likely understand the importance of having one good meeting over two rushed ones
• Try your best to schedule a different appointment at another time
• Prioritize your highest-value clients where possible

Set up appointment reminders

It can be all too easy to forget appointments, especially when you’ve got a lot to juggle!

Setting up appointment reminders can help with this. It’s a great way to keep your upcoming appointments fresh in your mind, and allows you to plan your day in the most efficient way.

Some booking solutions will also allow you to send out appointment reminders to all meeting or appointment participants. This is a great way to ensure that you don’t end up wasting time that could be spent pursuing other avenues of business. 

Integrating your booking system with your VoIP phone system will allow you to send these reminders automatically, and at a low cost.

What to do if you double book

Sometimes double booking is unavoidable. Here’s what to do when the worst happens.

Establish priority

Prioritize your highest-value client where possible. While this may seem callous, you need to approach the situation with the needs of the business in mind. 

Hopefully, you can still rearrange the appointment with your other client, but if for any reason you can’t, at least you've got a better chance of saving the more profitable partnership.

Communicate

However you go about trying to correct a double booking, it's imperative that you communicate clearly with the affected clients. After all, clear and quick communication are important drivers of a positive customer experience.

Your best chance of rearranging an appointment is to start talking to your clients. Have a game plan in mind before you reach out, but be prepared to be flexible if it doesn’t meet their needs. 

Communicating with your client early will also allow you to discuss and offer an alternative solution. For example, say your client has been having difficulties with your tech solution and wanted a meeting with a member of your support team. But, you discover they’ve been double booked. 

As time is of the essence here, you could offer to use remote support software instead so your support team can fix the issue without the client being present; removing travel time and making it easier to rearrange the appointment. 

Finally, if you need to cancel an appointment, the more notice you can give the better. The later you leave it to cancel, the less chance your client has to fill the time in other ways, and the grumpier they’re likely to be.

Avoid double booking and halve your stress levels

Double booking in business appointments can create unnecessary stress for you and your clients, negatively impact customer satisfaction, and reduce the overall productivity of your organization.

Take steps to reduce double booking wherever possible. Use sophisticated tools such as a centralized booking system to keep your calendars up to date across every channel. 

Use good booking practices such as manually approving appointments and appointment reminders to ensure you stay on top of your schedule at all times.