When I founded my ADR practice 12 years ago, I didn’t yet have an executive assistant to help with the day-to-day management of the business. Sometimes, the phone and email tag with prospective and current clients who wanted to schedule got pretty frustrating.
If you’re a solo practitioner or want your assistant to attend to things other than client scheduling, it’s worth considering an online appointment service or online calendar accessible to clients. I’ve written before about these two options in my articles, Getting Things Done with Google Calendar and Tech Tools for Mediators.
Now a new service is on the scene and it looks pretty remarkable. TimeDriver Personal Scheduler describes itself as “the world leader in customer self-service appointment scheduling.” That may just be right.
Their user interface is intuitive and simple. Setup was a breeze. But the real deal-maker for me is the ability to connect to and sync with a calendar I already use.
Appointment schedulers of even the recent past required use of the scheduling service’s calendar, meaning that users essentially had to maintain two calendars – their own and the one owned by the scheduling service. Talk about duplicative and wasteful. TimeDriver fixed that problem and can connect automatically with your Outlook or Google calendar.
TimeDriver offers a 90-day free trial and the annual fee is a very fair $29.95 U.S. It’s still in beta but I haven’t found it buggy. If you head on over there to test drive it, be sure to demo the 30-second “consulting,” as it gives a nice overview of how a mediator might make best use of the service.
Update on April 6, 2009: I had a problem getting TimeDriver to recognize and use the specific Google calendar I want to integrate with TimeDriver’s service. TimeDriver’s customer support took on the problem, kept communication channels open with me, tried out several solutions, and fixed the problem. I feel really good about reviewing a service like TimeDriver when the tech support experience is so outstanding. Thanks, Liz and the TimeDriver development team!
Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.
Nice….but what would you recommend for a mediation agency that wants to keep track of multiple mediator schedules?
Hi, Stephanie -
AppointmentQuest, as described in my article at http://mediatortech.com/tech-tools-for-mediators/ works for multiple staff with varying schedules.
Though I’ve not used it personally, Genbook.com also works with multiple staff and services.
Hope this helps!