Zoho Bookings Reviews & Insights

Zoho Bookings is currently being tested to invite customers and schedule customer meetings, both in house and at the customer location.

We have also set up Zoho Bookings to reserve designated equipment to be checked out for a specific time period and show that it is not available at specific times/dates

It is well suited for scheduling external customer meetings, so the customer sees the availability of a sales agent for any given day, and times that the agent is not available at all, based on an existing outlook calendar.

It also is well suited for reserving equipment or resources both for internal and external situations. Its also suited for if you're offering an internal training/meetings and have several time slots available, but want to put a limit on how many people can sign up for each timeslot.

As we were having more and more sales queries and presentation to attend, Zoho Bookings helped us in organizing all these meetings into one central dashboard, into calendar view. This really helped into organizing and managing our staffs' meeting schedule, as well as optimizing human resources where required: balancing the meetings' tasks.

Zoho Bookings from my personal experience is best when you have a growing list of customers and need to get free of the hassle of taking written notes in your Rolodex. It's like a CRM but optimized for booking tasks. I believe it would be less suited, if you are a new business starting from scratch.

The big challenge was the going back and forth via email trying to lock down an in-person meeting, a phone call, or even a video chat session. And even trying to do it over the phone was a challenge. What Zoho Bookings has allowed us to do is to create the various meeting types we accept and then allow clients and even the public access to the free times in our calendar. Some of our initial consultations are free while others are paid. If someone elects a paid consultation, they pay in advance which makes it a bona fide consultation on our end. There are reminders both internally and externally for the booking, reminders, and cancellations. We are in full control of our schedule and the hours we operate. It's saved us a lot of time which enables us to run a more optimized operation.

I've tried some of the other online booking services and while there were good, they didn't have all of the features that Zoho Bookings does and since I'm already a Zoho One subscriber, it doesn't cost me anything more. I think virtually any type of business can use Bookings as it's not geared to a specific industry but can be customized for use in any type of industry. I would love to see salons use it as I think it can be truly a way for them to better book clients than using a paper calendar which I see many using. I also think massage therapists would also benefit but using Bookings. If you are a solopreneur or have a sales team, there's no way you can't benefit by using Bookings for your phone appointments, Zoom/Video meetings, or in-person meetings. There is also a resource function which allows you to block out conference rooms and other resources.

We use it for customer service. It is a tool we use to make our support department more robust. We spent time and energy on just coordinating available time slots for project followup, questions review, or short discovery sessions. It also helps streamline remote processes, some things that can't be solved in an email, but no need for a face-to-face visit.

It really depends on what you want to do. Some resource or workspace management might be limited. We use it to schedule conference calls, and this works great, together with Zoho Meetings. It is also great for simple service businesses, but might not be the best if you need consumables, inventory, etc.