In today's fast-paced life staying organized and keeping your business goals on track is one of the biggest hurdles businesses are facing these days. On one side, things are fastly moving towards digital platforms whereas, on the other side, startups and mid-sized businesses are struggling hard to cope up with the increasing demand for meeting management.
All thanks to the app development industry, empowering businesses with an on-demand business meeting scheduling app like Calendly and making the entire meeting scheduling and management process painless for clients.
In fact, with more and more virtual meetings, online conference calls, and webinars happening globally, do you still prefer to stay glued to all those tired or manual ways of booking a calendar...
Surely, in this highly competitive world, you must be curious to onboard several new solutions that make your business sound technically, flexible, well-managed, and seamlessly operated.
So millions of people from all across the world like to book their business meetings on Calendly rather than making a phone call or manually marking the calendar. We believe that developing an on-demand meeting scheduling app in 2022 will make it easier to book meetings for clients using tablets and smartphones.
The trend of online bookings among customers is massively increasing and led the growth at a rapid pace. There is a rise in the adoption of online booking software in the healthcare and education sector as well. Since, with the implementation of this software, there is a better chance of delivering an improved client experience, though developing a meeting booking app is a considerable decision.
But the question is how to get started and how much does it cost to build an on-demand meeting scheduling app for your business...
Here are the key highlights of the blog:
- Understanding the Concept of Online Appointment Booking Apps And Increasing Popularity
- *Getting Started With The Online Meeting Scheduling App Development\
- Why Does Online Meeting Scheduling Apps Rock?\
- What Does An Online Appointment Scheduling App Do and Who Uses It?\
- The Best Online Scheduling Apps That You Can Compare With*
- *How To Create a Successful Online Appointment Scheduling App?\
- The Pre-development Stage: Tips To Minimize Risks and Cut Down Costs\
- Top Features and Functionalities and Its Rough Estimations\
- UI/UX Designing of Your App\
- Testing Your Booking App With Real Users*
- How Much Does It Cost To Build An On-Demand Appointment Scheduling App in 2022?
- Conclusion: Get Ready To Complete With Industry Leading Online Meeting Scheduling Apps
Let's get into details of each point for better understanding...
Understanding the Concept of Online Appointment Booking Apps And Increasing Popularity
Appointment scheduling apps have become a buzzword in today's business world. Regardless of business verticals, people are proactively adopting these solutions to simplify their business processes.
If you are still untouched by this concept, then you need to know that online meeting scheduling software is web-based apps that allow you to invite or collaborate with other people from all across the world by using the calendar-based interface. The biggest advantage of using this tool for your business is it prevents double booking at the same slot which usually happens when you are using multiple booking platforms. The multiple people are coordinating on multiple platforms for meeting timings, therefore, minimize the risk of overlapping the meetings and wasting valuable resources.
Appointment scheduling software provides a business tool that allows clients to book, reschedule, and cancel appointments through web-interface or mobile device.
Furthermore, the online meeting solutions are easily accessible on desktop and mobile devices, so you can book a meeting sitting anywhere in the world. After knowing all these facts about the on-demand meeting scheduling app, many of you are curious to hire a mobile app development company to get started with an app, but many of you are wondering why this app solution is getting so much popularity...
Market Insights Portraying Increasing a Popularity of Online Appointment Booking App
Appointment Scheduling solutions are quickly taking place in various business verticals and led to increasing market size. Here are the market statistics for better insights:
- According to the statistics, the global appointment scheduling software market size is expected to reach $546.31 million by 2026 from $208.85 million in 2018.
- As per the research studies, the appointment scheduling software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.1% from 2019 to 2026.
- As per the reports, North America has dominated the overall appointment scheduling software market share as they are the early adopters of digitization.
- According to the Market Survey report, the leading players of online meeting scheduling app is Calendly, Appointy, Square, Inc., TimeTrade, and more.
- Based on Type, the market is bifurcated into a web-based, mobile app, and other platforms but web-based accounted for the largest market share in 2019.
In a nutshell: Hopefully, these statistics are representing how progressively the online meeting scheduling market is taking over traditional ways of appointment booking in various business verticals.
Let's get straight to the details of getting started with app development...
Getting Started With The Online Appointment Scheduling App Development
With various emerging technologies and innovations in the mobile app development industry, booking apps have out-shined as the most demanding solutions among businesses.
Also, the impact of the global pandemic has accelerated the demand for online meeting booking platforms and provides the possibility to interact with your business online. But before you get into the process of hiring a mobile app developer, many of you're in a confusion about how long the requirement will last and whether it is a worthy decision to create a business appointment scheduling app, then you need to check out why these solutions are useful...
Why Does Online Meeting Scheduling Applications Trending?
Firstly, developing an online meeting booking app can be a value-added solution to your venture. It works both ways for business owners as well as for customers. Let's understand how...
Benefits of Developing Online Booking App For Customers
- Keep Them Informed About Upcoming Meetings
The integration of the booking app with customers' calendars will keep them informed about upcoming events. This could be one of the coolest features of your app and keep them engaged with the platform. With this feature, customers can also check the booking status of their meeting, review the booking history, and browse the information right from their device.
- 24/7 Availability of Your Brand
Having an appointment booking app for your business means your customers can schedule the meeting from anywhere around the globe and from any device.
- Easy Accessibility To Book Calendar
While accessing an online meeting scheduling app, clients can access the calendar and book the most suitable meeting slot with just one tap. All thanks to software development companies that have made it simple and far easier to access. The booking dashboard will let them know about the number of slots available for meetings. Once they click on the slot, it will disappear from the dashboard and confirm the meeting.
For Business Owners
- Automate The Workflow
With an online booking tool, you can get the appointment details sent directly on your CRM which further helps you gather the personal information of the customers and use it for marketing purposes. By utilizing that information, you can set up notifications, follow up emails, remind a customer about the appointment, check the service quality and ask for feedback.
- Booking Available 24/7
The online booking app also provides you with an opportunity to turn your customers into potential deals by allowing them to book a meeting anytime as per their preference. It works when you and your target audience are working in different time zones.
- Better Employee Time Management
Your team could better manage the high-priority tasks and be able to focus on service enhancement while you have an online meeting scheduling system in place.
Hopefully, these benefits are influencing you to invest in this mobile app solution. But being a business owner, your constant concern must be related to the app development cost and who needs an appointment software.
Let's discuss further...
What Does An Online Appointment Scheduling App Do and Who Uses It?
The on-demand online scheduling app is more like calendars with a seamless scheduling facility but the unique part is, it can often be integrated with other applications like video conferencing apps, Gmail, Google Meets, and more. Some functionalities of this app solution will work well with payment processors, you can charge and collect fees before the next meeting takes place.
Moreover, these tools work like a magnet on your website especially for people who are eager to know more about your services and want to get connected with you further.
But the question is who can benefit from an appointment booking solution...
Well, all business professionals can leverage the benefits of these tools, but they are majorly beneficial for corporations, healthcare, education, beauty and wellness, and other businesses. However, based on the survey report, corporations accounted for the largest market share in 2019. Moreover, the growing adoption of cloud-based solutions by enterprises of all sizes to improve the services.
So no matter whether you are a startup or a leading enterprise before you proceed further, you need to compare other online scheduling apps available in the market.
The Best Online Scheduling Apps That You Can Compare With
There is no denying the fact that all businesses can benefit from the online meeting scheduling app, but before you get into this industry, keep in mind with whom you need to compete. Here we have gathered some of the meeting scheduling apps that are already ruling this domain and have empowered several businesses.
Top Meeting Scheduling Apps That You Need to Know
- Calendar: If you want to build a meeting scheduling app that is as simple as a calendar to access, then "Calendar" is one of the solid picks. With the implementation of AI functionalities, Calendar has simplified the entire scheduling process and syncs all the devices and updates about meetings with the paid version.
- Calendly: Calendly is known as one of the most popular online booking systems for those who want to collaborate with multiple team members. With a wide range of unique features like one-on-one meetings, collective, round-robin meetings, and more, it has quickly set the benchmark in the market.
- Acuity: This type of appointment booking app has some unique concepts that allow users to block out the times that work for them and allow meeting attendees to pick from the available meeting slots. Businesses can look further for the paid version if they are planning to grow their business through this app.
After reading all such details, one central question that arrives in front of you is "how to develop a successful online scheduling app that adds a competitive edge to your business...
How To Create a Successful Online Appointment Scheduling App?
At this point, you already know what exactly appointment scheduling apps are, how they work, and with whom you need to compete in the market. So to get started with the app development process, you need to hire a mobile app development company that can understand your business idea and be able to transform it into a successful solution. And if you are planning to build a scheduling app like Calendly or Acuity, then make sure your app development team must consist of an experienced project manager, skilled software developer, competent business analyst, UI/UX designer, and app tester that can lead the project right directly.
So to make it less complicated and help you understand what elements of app development acquire the maximum budget and risk, we have divided the development phases.
The Pre-development Stage: Tips To Minimize Risks and Cut Down Costs
The first thing that sticks to your mind when it decides on developing an app is to understand "what functionalities do you need to offer in an app"?
1. Top Features and Functionalities and Its Rough Estimations
When it comes to developing a scheduling app, "what features and functionalities you propose in the scheduling app", is the biggest part of developing an app. So here are the features that you could choose to implement when developing a scheduling app for your business...
- Signup/Registration: To get started with the app, allow users to get registered with your app by using email.ID, contact details, or social media integration feature. With just one tap, users can sign up for the app using the credentials of their social media account.
- Book Appointments: Once Users sign up for the app, they will be directly converted to a calendar where they block a meeting slot at their preferred time.
- Different Time Zones: Since people from different regions are accessing this app and to avoid time zone confusion, it is worth adding the feature of time clocks for different time zones.
- Edit Appointment Details: Add the flexibility to edit or delete existing appointments, tasks, events before the meeting takes place.
- Automate Work Schedules: The automation capabilities of the app will help you create the best work schedules with a simple feature of auto-schedule generation. Based on the previous work schedules, an app will create it further.
- Scheduling Tools: Provide the facility to choose from different meeting rooms such as one-on-one meetings, collaborative meetings, group meetings, and more.
- Available Time Slots: Add an ability to see the available time slots to team members to make them available at that specific time.
- Mark Time-Off: Make sure you have a feature in the app that allows your team members to mark days or hours as time off or list all local holidays so that the app doesn't provide any booking slots.
- Push Notifications: This is one of the most important features of your app that keep your users and team members informed about the upcoming meetings via in-app message, email, or SMS.
- Prevent double booking: The app should have the capability to prevent double bookings by restricting people to book again with the same ID or from the same details.
- Easy Integrations: Make sure your app can easily integrate with other applications like Gmail, Excel, etc. to extend the functionality.
- Payment Gateways: Allow people to make payments using multiple payment options and gateways like a credit card, debit card, PayPal, Google Pay, and more.
On average, it will take around 3 to 4 months to create a scheduling app with these features and cost around USD 20,000+. However, how will you make sure that users will like this product?
To avoid risk, it is worth launching a basic app version with fewer features and quickly marketing the app. The biggest benefit of planning the MVP app or scheduling app is it helps you obtain the market feedback and provide the space to go back to the wire-framing to make alterations in the app if users don't like it. And, in case they like the concept, you can scale up the product based on market feedback.
But one such factor that can make or break your business idea is app navigation.
2. UI/UX Designing of Your App
While developing an app, user experience and app navigation are the most important considerations. The biggest mistake businesses usually make is to give a fancy look to their app that unfortunately, makes a complex app structure that is hard to navigate. To avoid such circumstances, it is worth hiring mobile app developer that helps in customizing the simple, easy and captivating UI/UX design of the app.
Also, the simple app design that ensures seamless navigation between screens is always appreciated by the users. On average, the UI/UX design of the app will take around 120 hours to 150 hours depending upon the complexity of the app.
3. Testing Your Booking App With Real Users
Once you are done with the development phase, now it's time to run an app on various testing modules to identify bugs or errors in the app. Make sure the quality assurance engineers will deeply test the app using different manual and automated testing tools to ensure high-performance of the app.
Lastly, the major question has remained unanswered yet: "How Much Does It Cost To Build a Scheduling app?"
How Much Does It Cost To Build An On-Demand Appointment Scheduling App?
Meeting scheduling apps offer a bunch of opportunities for business growth as well to customers by providing the flexibility to reserve their meeting booking slots right from their own mobile device and check details further.
Since every business has different requirements and accordingly these service apps are developed, therefore there is no standard price for developing a scheduling app.
The cost of developing such kinds of solutions is majorly dependent upon the functionalities and features, UI/UX design, testing process, the complexity of the app, choice of platform to launch an app, and more. While there is a huge range of possibilities to customize this app solution with different features, therefore, there is no permanent cost.
But if you are planning to create your own scheduling app and wondering how much it will cost you to build an app, then considering all such features and complexity of the app, the app development cost comes out to between USD 25,000 to 35,000+ for each platform.
Before you come to any conclusion, it is worth consulting experts to discuss your project details and get the estimations.
Conclusion: Get Ready To Complete With Industry Leading Online Meeting Scheduling Apps
With this blog, surely you get an idea that mobile booking is the new normal and a future business opportunity. Since customer demand is now quickly changing from phone or email bookings to simple, easy-to-use, and functional apps with clean navigation. Therefore, hiring an app development company to build a scheduling app like Calendly is a worthy decision.
So if you are also planning to have a solution like Calendly, then all you need is to have the right app development team that can understand your target audience and personalize the app with features that your customers would look forward to. Since they are skilled and expertise dealing with market needs, therefore, they provide you with a better solution to stand with their requirements.
Thank you for reading.