Today’s world markets are saturated, no matter the kind of industry or size of market you are in, because in this day and age, you are always going to find a thousand other businesses just like yours doing the same thing as you and looking to make a difference just like you in acquiring the limited number of clients in this thinly stretched out saturated market.

In a competitive setting such as this, it can be quite difficult to differentiate yourself from the competition, but one of the classic ways to do it is with the help of customer experience.

Customer experience is not just about providing a good quality of service, but also providing a frictionless experience when it comes to booking that service in the form of appointments for that service.

Creating and scheduling appointments, however, is a difficult process because you need to factor in multiple variables whenever you are trying to schedule an appointment for a client for your service or even just for a consultation call.

When you do this manually, you need to factor in other clients and their timings and if it is an international client, then you need to factor in their local time as well.

The reason why this is so crucial is because if you make a mistake in appointment scheduling, the client will simply have a very bad experience and they might not even come back to give you a second chance.

This is where we bring you to the fantastic world of AI call assistant automation in order to make sure all appointment scheduling is done automatically for you.

But what exactly is an AI call assistant for customer appointments? Let’s understand that first, so that we can find out all the different ways you can schedule appointments, from the manual way to the fully automated way.

So, let’s begin.

What Is an AI Call Assistant for Customer Appointment Scheduling?

In order to understand AI call assistants for customer appointment scheduling, we need to understand what is an AI call assistant. It is basically a smart ML-trained NLP system that can help you make a receive phone calls as well as understand natural speech and even respond to that speech in the right context.

It is trained on existing call data and is able to pick up appointment queries and automatically enter those queries in a chosen calendar or appointment scheduling system.

The very basic purpose of an AI call assistant is:

Making Calls

The AI call assistant is capable of making outbound calls to follow up on leads or even confirm bookings and book appointments directly from the clients without any human intervention.Receiving Calls

AI call assistants are also capable of answering inbound calls and referring to existing databases in order to help with queries, as well as book appointments and reschedule existing appointments as well and help out customers with information regarding available company data.Extracting Data from Calls

Additionally, AI call assistants also have the capability of extracting important details during a call and this call can be between human call centre agents and clients or even AI agents and the clients.

The capability of AI call assistants to analyse the call and extract data from calls gives them the ability to also analyse that data for appointment scheduling with very high levels of accuracy and automatically create schedules for clients or even reschedule existing appointments.

Different Ways to Set Up Appointment Scheduling Systems

The Manual Way – Human Scheduling

This is an old school method of scheduling appointments and this is when the client simply calls the business, a human picks up the call and creates an appointment on their calendar based on the needs of the client.

This kind of system has always been in use and is still used in most businesses and especially with small and medium-sized businesses, where a receptionist or an agent will usually do the answering of calls or messages from customers and create appointments.

The advantage of this manual system is that if you are running a business that is completely manual or highly data sensitive, then it makes sense to do it the manual way but the disadvantages are too many to count, from this being time-consuming to being very prone to errors and also being inefficient.

Semi-Automated Scheduling – Using Online Tools

This is a step up from the completely manual system of scheduling and this is semi-automated, where the business usually integrates some sort of online booking tool such as Calendly, Acuity Scheduling, or Setmore to schedule appointments.

This is usually done with the help of links that can be sent out in messages and this is a good system because it is easy to set up and great for smaller-sized businesses.

However, the disadvantage of this semi-automated scheduling system is that you still depend on the client to click on the link and create an appointment and there is no way for this system to handle inbound phone calls automatically or even create calls.

Voice AI Scheduling – Using an AI Call Assistant (Restricted)

If you are looking for something more automated, that is along the lines of full automation, then voice AI scheduling is the way to go.

This is a human-intervention-based restricted version of the fully automated system, where you can have the AI calling agent receive calls or make calls and sound very natural and understand the customer’s intent regarding the kind of booking they want to create.

This system then checks your calendars and scheduling system in real time in order to find out open slots and create an appointment and send you a confirmation message or email regarding that.

This kind of a system is also compatible with human-to-human calls, with the system automatically creating appointments from the data analysis it is doing during the call.

The only downside to this system is that you are going to need human intervention from time to time for operations.

The downside is actually willingly put in place and we are talking about human intervention when it comes to making or receiving calls, as since this is not completely automated, a human is still needed to authenticate the outbound call initiation or receive the call or even confirm bookings etc.

This is called a restricted automated AI calling solution, with the restriction put in place for human oversight and security reasons and is great for small and medium-sized businesses.

Full Automation with AI Calling and Data Entry Tools (Unrestricted)

If you are looking for a system that is completely automated in receiving and answering calls or even making calls and integrating itself with scheduling systems and call centre automation tools without any restrictions then this is it.

This is the kind of tool that is utilised by larger call centres for completely automating their call operations when it comes to making or receiving phone calls and automatically registering them within your CRM or internal systems.

This is the kind of solution that can run automatically without any human intervention and is able to simply make calls and talk naturally with the client and register in appointments or reschedule existing appointments, or even cancel appointments based on any form of request the client might have.

You can utilise a system like this if you want to completely automate your call centre operations and put in place AI calling agents to do all the work for you.

We hope this blog has helped you understand how you can automate appointment scheduling right now and what are all the different ways to do it, whether it is manually or with AI.

If you are someone who is looking for one of the most robust industry solutions out there that will help you completely automate appointment scheduling with the help of AI call agents or even automate your call centre operations with AI calling agents, we are here for you.

We present to you CallMate by ThinkToShare, the fully autonomous AI inbound and outbound calling solution, along with one of the most accurate data entry functionalities in the industry.

CallMate will not just help you make or receive calls with the help of natural-sounding AI agents, but will also help you in the automated registration of appointment requests from clients, as well as in automated appointment rescheduling requests.

We welcome you to visit our website and check out more details on CallMate.