With You run assessment meetings to understand a client’s needs and how they can best support them. This is an early interaction in their support services. These appointments are often delivered remotely.

With You were booking appointments by phone, but wanted to make it possible for people to self-refer for assessment. They knew that people were looking for help online. Research projects, website analytics and their live chat service told them this. They wanted it to be possible for people to book an assessment session when they were looking for help.

They also wanted a system that meant staff could add appointments for people who preferred to book by phone. They needed to be able to track all appointments in one place.

With You were already using Calendly for some services. They decided to keep using it because it:

• had already been approved by their information governance (data protection) team.

• is an “off the shelf” system without development costs.

• works well with Google Calendar, which they use

• allowed staff to make appointments on behalf of clients using the phone as well as taking online bookings

Also, some of their staff already knew how to use it. Because of this they also knew its limitations. Calendly:

• doesn’t allow you to change how it looks.

• offers a way to add questions to the booking form - but not everything With You wanted.
  

• doesn’t easily connect to client management systems. This means workers have to manually log the appointment dates on their system.

• only processes bookings if the person booking has an email address. This was the biggest problem, as some service users don't use email. 

• couldn’t be customised to help people check they were eligible for the service they were booking with (for example, that they lived in the right location).

With You have found Calendly works well enough to be usable and deliver value. However they aim to replace it with a bespoke (developer built) system that gives them extra functionality, avoids these issues and saves them time.  

When With You first started, they tried connecting Google Calendars for each staff member to Calendly. But this became difficult as staff weren't used to using Google Calendar. 

Instead they now have a Google Calendar for each service. They set the times Calendly can offer appointment slots. One person monitors that calendar. When an appointment is booked they select an available staff member and invite them to the appointment using the feature within the calendar.

They also make sure that Calendly is set to:

• The correct length for their service's appointments (usually 1 hour)

• A maximum number of appointments per day or week so the service isn’t overloaded

• An appropriate amount of break time between each appointment.

With You introduced their system to a small number of people at a time. They trained them and acknowledged that there were some extra admin steps because of Calendly’s limitations.

Gradually they increased the number of appointments on offer through the new system.

They discovered that it helped to introduce this new appointment system to staff as a method of self-referral - to get support. This helped staff support the culture change required to make it work.

With You worked with their web content team and developers to make sure that each service's page had booking button. The button linked to that team's Calendly appointments. The button was more visible than a text link.

The website also offered a phone number for people who did not want to book online.