How Virtual Receptionists Eliminate Calendar Management Issues

Struggling with deadlines? Missing meetings because you’re overbooked? Losing clients because you just can’t seem to get on the same page regarding their availability? Calendar chaos is real and it’s a major driver of productivity loss and efficiency erosion in today’s businesses.

Chances are good that you know your calendar is a mess and feel powerless to do anything about it. There are tons of tools available that promise to help you schedule better and avoid snafus, but most of them don’t work the way they claim. Others have a steep learning curve, or maybe they don’t integrate with your tech stack, which makes them unusable because you need something that dovetails with the tools you’re already using.

There’s a solution that doesn’t require learning to navigate new software or trying to add something else to your already-overloaded technology stack: virtual receptionists. 

A virtual receptionist can help tame your calendar and eliminate management issues that are dragging your business down.

The most common calendar management issues 

To understand how virtual receptionists can eliminate calendar management issues, we must talk about some of the most common issues you’re likely to face. 

Impossible meeting schedules

Meetings are the bane of your employees but they’re crucial in many respects. However, if you’re booking impossible meetings, there’s a very good chance that your team feels overburdened and burned out. There’s also a very good chance that your productivity is bottoming out and your team’s efficiency is poor. Examples of impossible meeting schedules include:

• More than one meeting scheduled at the same time
• Back-to-back meetings

Your team can’t be in more than one meeting at the same time, and even if you’re meeting virtually, back-to-back meetings are always a bad idea. You need to give your people a breather in between, even if it’s just a few minutes to use the restroom and grab a cup of coffee.

Virtual receptionists can help ensure that overbooking and back-to-back scheduling are things of the past. With access to all the information necessary, as well as important information about your priorities, they can eliminate these issues and plan a streamlined calendar that leaves time for everything.

Trying to wrangle multiple calendars

You have so many calendar options today. There’s Google, Apple, Microsoft, Calendly, and a horde of other options. And sometimes, those calendars don’t play well together. 

That could mean that appointments booked through one app don’t populate to the primary calendar that you use to schedule your week, or that meetings you add to one calendar don’t migrate to the calendar the team uses. No matter what, it leads to chaos, lost time, and lost productivity. 

Virtual receptionists can help you tame the tangle of multiple calendars and ensure that tasks, meetings, consultations, calls, and other important entries are front and center for everyone within your company’s primary calendar system.

Not leaving enough time for work

In today’s meeting-heavy world, it can feel like you’re being forced to schedule work around the edges of meetings, phone calls, consultations, and more. This is perhaps the most common calendar management issue — failing to leave enough time for your actual work. 

Your days must consist of more than just endless meetings, conference calls, and client consultations. If you don’t have time to work, then your business will suffer for it. After all, it’s the billable work that pays the bills, not the meetings and other communications. While they might take up the bulk of your time, they don’t generate profit.

Virtual receptionists can work with you and your team to understand workflows and tasks, and then build schedules around them. That helps ensure that you’re able to get work done, while also balancing other tasks so that nothing falls through the cracks.  

Lack of prioritization

Take a quick look at your calendar. You probably see entries on each day: three meetings on Tuesday, a client consultation on Wednesday morning, followed by a vendor meeting in the afternoon, and then three conference calls on Friday. It can add up quickly. 

Each calendar entry gives you important information, like when the event takes place, who’s involved, and where it will be held. What they probably don’t tell you is what priority is placed on each entry. If you were forced to pick between some of the things scheduled, which are the most important? And what makes one scheduled event more important than another? 

Without a way to prioritize between high-value and low-value tasks, you could be wasting time that could be better spent on something else. Virtual receptionists help you assign value to each task and then schedule everything with an eye toward appropriate task value, productivity, and profitability. It enables you to balance high and low-value tasks so that everything gets done. Not to mention, low-quality client consultations never make it to your schedule at all — reserving your time only for worthwhile meetings. 

Virtual receptionists are the key to an organized, successful business

No matter your industry or niche, calendar chaos can erode productivity, efficiency, and profitability. It can lead to burnout on your team, overbooking that leaves customers hanging, and damage to your brand’s reputation. 

Virtual receptionists help you tame that chaos and reclaim your calendar. From scheduling meetings while leaving time for work to prioritizing tasks appropriately, Smith.ai’s virtual receptionists help you streamline operations. In addition, we can offer other important services so you can reclaim your time. That includes 24/7 phone answering, 24/7 website chat, lead screening and intake, payment collection, email and SMS follow-up, and more. We can also integrate with just about any calendar apps you and your team might use.

To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai.