Would you be willing to let clients self-schedule meetings with you or your staff? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could skip the phone call or emails required to schedule the meeting? What if you clients could access your calendar online and pick a meeting time that’s convenient for them and for you?

What about prospective clients? Would you be willing to allow them to schedule their own appointments?

I’m not sure if I’m ready to open my calendar up to anyone, anytime. I feel a need to decide whether a meeting is warranted, at least with potential, as distinguished from existing, clients. I suppose having an existing client schedule a meeting wouldn’t be a problem. It might even make my life easier if they picked a time from a list of my available slots.

bookingbug is a hosted service that makes self-scheduling possible. They offer a free plan and a number of more fully featured pay plans starting at $10 per month. There’s no software to install or maintain. You embed a widget on your website to give clients the ability schedule meetings. You can even have them make payment for the meeting through bookingbug. You can embed the widget on your public site or behind a wall on your client portal. You can even put the widget on social media sites like Facebook. Your calendar can be customized to match the look and feel of your website and your clients won’t leave your website while booking their meeting.

This is an interesting service. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll put it to work in my practice, but I’m thinking pretty hard about it. Giving our clients a sense of control over their cases is a formula for happiness. The happier they are the happier we are. It’s win-win and bookingbug may end up playing a part in that formula.