Everybody wants a perfect meeting. In fact, it’s crucial if you want your business to prosper. But if your recipe is “just use Outlook”, you could be in for trouble.
Why? Does this sound familiar?
You find that you are struggling to juggle all the booking elements when you try to use Outlook on its own.
This is how it goes: You can book rooms, but you can’t book the AV you need. So you manage to put AV in the notes, but then you find out that a couple of your guests have specific meal requirements.
Then the worst happens. The team members and your client are on the notice for the meeting, but the date changes by two days.
Oh dear. It’s an admin nightmare to remember all the fields, files, sticky notes and emails you need to change for everything not included in the Outlook meeting.
Many modern organisations are digitising and streamlining their business processes, and find many booking situations are disjointed when using Outlook.
For complex organisations, Outlook isn’t quite up to the job of creating perfect meetings these days. As meeting room booking software has become more and more sophisticated, that’s becoming pretty obvious.
With “just Outlook”, it’s easy to miss something, and your meeting starts is badly affected – or doesn’t happen. It’s embarrassing when a client arrives and your team is booked or out of office.
Areas where Outlook can let you down
Using Outlook, it’s impossible to book the room and vended services such as catering in one single process. Instead, you have to have to:
- Find meeting space by repeatedly opening individual room calendars to check availability with the scheduling assistant.
- Get in touch with the catering team to book refreshments, letting them know where to deliver.
To do this, you have to know the business rules, notification and cut off times for each item. You also have to factor in time for setup and breakdown of the space.
Some items might need a cost code or details for client chargeback, too. In reality, you have to take quite some time to liaise with the service provider, because you have to add details to progress or turn down the request.
If the meeting changes, it hurts.
If details change, including refreshments or location, the slog of telling the service provider goes on and on.
You’re busy, and it’s easy to forget something, so the wrong items can be delivered to the wrong place at the wrong time.
One thing is for sure: it doesn’t make you or your organisation look good.
If you have to cancel a meeting, one common mistake is cancelling the room reservation, but forgetting the service providers. This creates waste and unnecessary catering costs.
On average, booking with Outlook takes more than 10 minutes.
That’s fine if you have only a few meetings to organise. But added up across a big enterprise with many meetings, and with lost business from making mistakes factored in, “Just use Outlook” can actually cost you growth.
Q. So if you find Outlook is broken, how do you fix it to create perfect meetings?
A. With integrated meeting room booking software.
With meeting room booking software at your disposal, you follow 4 simple steps to book your meeting:
- Choose the meeting space type, date, time and how many attendees
- Choose which room you want from the search results
- Choose vended services available for that specific room
- Confirm the booking.
The meeting room booking software takes away the manual grind – automatically.
- It applies business rules, notifications, and cut-offs, and factors in set up and break down times
- It emails all service teams and uses through a service tracker to collate and display tasks in order of time
- It updates the service provider if you change the booking – an easy-to-do process
- If the meeting is cancelled, all associated deliverables are automatically cancelled too
- All cost codes are entered when booking so they can be reported on and processed without cross-checking.
On average, booking with meeting room booking software takes less than 30 seconds.
If you’re a busy person making 100 bookings a month, that adds up to 15 hours.
By ruling out mistakes, double bookings and client problems, the saving is even greater.
And that’s not to mention the benefits it brings to your workforce’s productivity and wellbeing by easing frustration and taking away tedious manual tasks.
So you can keep using Outlook on its own, wasting time and money…or you can download our brochure and set up a demo for Rendezvous meeting room booking software, which integrates with Outlook and 365.
Why waste another minute? You could be holding the perfect meetings that spark growth?
