Why financial planners need appointment scheduling software

Being a financial planner is no simple feat. You manage and help clients reach their goals, lead your team, monitor market fluctuations, and handle paperwork, while cycling between back-to-back meetings.

All this work hinges on meeting clients in the first place, bringing scheduling into the picture. So, as a financial planner, in addition to your work, you should reach out, send emails, follow up with clients, and collect payments. That is tiring!

Here, an appointment scheduling application like Zoho Bookings can share your burden, freeing up time for what matters the most.

Why should financial planners use Zoho Bookings?

Stop juggling emails

Despite being a time-tested process, email-based scheduling might not be as efficient for the following reasons:

Too many back and forth conversations - Sometimes it takes multiple emails to find an available time that works for all parties.

Doesn't account for delayed response times - You deal with busy individuals (business owners, executives, athletes, and the like) who may not be swift to respond to your emails when you check for their availability.

Involves a ton of repetitive manual work - Even if clients email you their availability, you still have to check your calendar, reserve a slot, and respond with the confirmed time slots for every single appointment.

Complexities with rescheduling and canceling - If a client wishes to reschedule, you'll have to drudge through several emails to finalize another slot.

With emails, providing financial consultations takes a back seat.

This is why using Zoho Bookings can help by scheduling appointments in seconds.

Have a single interface

A single booking interface not only elevates your firm's professionalism but also simplifies scheduling for you and your clients.

Without it, you may find yourself engaging in conversational ping-pong with your clients, as seen in the following example:

During tax season, you might be slower to respond to client appointment requests via email. This prompts them to reach out via text messages or calls, which can be missed, leading to two problems:

• If the client was a high net worth individual, you've lost potential revenue, priceless referrals, and a significant bump to assets under management (AUM).
• Data privacy is compromised as you've got customer info spread across several different platforms. Also, handling multiple requests for a single appointment impacts your productivity.

But a single booking interface helps you:

• Deliver a seamless scheduling experience by enabling clients to self-schedule appointments.
• Address a client's peak moment of interest, which usually wanes down as time passes.
• Provide instantaneous confirmation about the meeting without leaving them hanging.

The benefits don't end here. In addition to this, clients' data privacy is ensured. You can automatically send emails or test notifications for the booked appointments.

Finally, Zoho Bookings brings a streamlined and digitized client acquisition process.

Stay informed and deliver effective client sessions

Amidst existing tasks, it's common for financial planners to overlook upcoming appointments. When dealing with venerable figures, this might leave you under-prepared.

Being informed of upcoming appointments helps you define meeting objectives, curate a list of questions for a better understanding of your client, and anticipate their concerns.

Zoho Bookings can help you by using:

Minimum booking notice to collect appointments well in advance

Ex: Setting a two-day minimum-booking notice avoids last-minute bookings and provides two days to prepare for appointments.

Staff reminders to notify yourself of upcoming appointments

You can receive notifications days, hours, or minutes before an appointment.

Calendar integrations to have an overall view of your bookings

Sync appointments with external calendars and stay on top of your schedule.

You can also use booking forms to collect more information from your clients, enabling you to deliver effective consultations.

Let scheduling take care of itself

Traditional scheduling constrains you to do the work involved in collecting appointments. In addition, you also have your everyday financial tasks to attend to, leaving you swamped. Financial planners have an average work week of 40 to 60 hours; your appointment collection window is restricted to that duration. This method doesn't take into consideration the complexities that entail cancelations and reschedules either.

With Zoho Bookings, you can:

• Collect appointments around the clock without lifting a finger, freeing up time for what you do best.
• Give clients the autonomy to self-schedule appointments. They can cancel or reschedule appointments without you facilitating the process, too.
• Set up automatic email notifications and reminders to ensure timely communication to your clients

Make Zoho Bookings your Swiss Army knife

With traditional scheduling, client information is spread across platforms. Due to this, missing out on key information before a meeting is a possibility, which can impact the effectiveness of your consultation.

Luckily, Zoho Bookings centralizes customer information and makes it easily accessible under a single roof. You can also integrate with Zoho CRM for efficient lead management.

Even if clients request an appointment in-person or via a call, you can use admin side-scheduling to book slots on behalf of your customers. This brings ad-hoc appointment requests right into your scheduling system, eliminating the possibility of data loss.

Note: Your data is safe with us since Zoho takes privacy seriously.

In addition, financial planners spend a lot of time collecting payments, notifying clients, and manually emailing meeting links.

With Zoho Bookings, you can integrate video conferencing tools into your system to generate meeting links automatically and send them using email notifications.

Another trouble that financial planners deal with is clients not showing up for meetings.

You can use Zoho Bookings to collect partial deposits or full payments to cut down on no-shows and to simplify payment collection from clients.

Therefore, Zoho Bookings becomes your holistic appointment scheduling app that automates repetitive admin work, creating time for what's more important.

Stand out from your competition with the booking page

The professionals you provide financial services for are as busy as you. When you use the Zoho Bookings booking page, you can:

• Demonstrate that you value the client's time and show you have a scheduling system in place that they can use to book a slot in seconds.
• Deliver an impactful booking experience by customizing the booking page to keep it in line with your branding preferences.

Set yourself apart from the competition by embedding your booking page on your website, add it to your domain, and set a new benchmark for what's considered to be a simple way to meet with a financial planner.

In addition to standing out, the booking page helps you deliver a compelling booking experience to reinforce strong brand recognition and recall.

Suits individuals and teams

From helping clients meet their monetary goals to admin related tasks, you're likely to be overburdened with too much on your plate. Allow Zoho Bookings to do the heavy lifting for you.

Set your availability, share your booking page, and let the appointments roll in.

If you're a freelance financial planner, Zoho Bookings can help you with:

• One-on-one bookings to meet clients.
• Email notifications and reminders to notify clients and to avoid no-shows.
• Embedding the booking page to collect appointments right from your website.
• Integrations (calendar, video conferencing and payments) to enhance the capabilities of Zoho Bookings.

If you're a part of a team, in addition to the above features, you can also leverage:

• Different user roles (Staff, manager, and admin) for easier control distribution across your team.
• Collective bookings to simplify client meetings with multiple hosts.
• Customized pricing to charge based on staff experience. For example, if several people from your team offer paid fact-finding calls, you can charge based on staff experience.

Time management is no longer a hassle

There are no boundaries with the traditional form of scheduling, giving clients the assumption you're available all the time. Apart from high priority clients, you'd also have day-to-day operations that need your attention. With Zoho Bookings, you can define your professional boundaries by setting your availability.

Think about this: You're in the midst of delivering a service or it's past your working hours, but your clients can still schedule appointments for the next day or next available slot from the comfort of their home.

Rather than being attached to the phone, allow Zoho Bookings to help you collect appointments. This saves time that can be devoted to your business operations.

Handle scalability better

Scheduling becomes complicated as your business expands, but the traditional way of scheduling ties you to your calendar rather than your clients.

For instance, in order to schedule five appointments, you'll have to send 10–15 different emails spread over several days. Now, imagine the spike in email volume when your business grows three-, five-, or ten-fold.

An automated system should never be a barrier for business growth. With Zoho Bookings being a software, it's easier to scale. Whether you wish to bring in a team or collect appointments, the process stays the same.

Conclusion

Technology might not be a top priority for a finance planner, but if an appointment scheduling software can simplify your life, integrate with your current business, and free up your time for what's more important, why not give it a try?

We offer a free trial (no credit card required) for Zoho Bookings to help you decide. If you have any questions, we're happy to help. Kindly send an email to hello@zohobookings.com