Calendly, SavvyCal and Other Meeting Schedulers are Not Great for Support Teams

Traditional online appointment scheduling software like Calendly, SavvyCal, and Acuity Scheduling are not the right solutions for efficient support teams. Support must be delivered at the team level, but these tools are fundamentally designed for individuals.

Support is a Team Sport

This may seem obvious, but most organizations fail to fully implement their support function as a team. When we say as a team, we mean a few things specifically:

1. Customers always interact with the support team, and never interact with individual team members. You must have a ticketing system, and ticket routing must be in control of the organization. Not individual team members, and not customers.
2. Ticket escalation must be handled by a well-defined process, not by high-performers taking over every “hard” ticket, and not by customers demanding it.
3. Organizations must be able to grow and shrink the support team on-demand, without customers noticing. Appointments should never be set on individual calendars or require a reschedule when the unexpected happens.

Why is Team-Based Support So Important?

Because support is expensive. Running your support as a team and ruthlessly adhering to a measurable, team-based process is the only way to manage costs effectively.

That means:

• Appointment scheduling links should be one-time use, preventing customers from accessing the same link for future support needs without first being routed there by the process.
• Appointment scheduling should be routed according to the organization’s process. While that may include allowing team members to block off times using their own calendars, it should not be the default.
• Appointment scheduling should not place events on individual calendars until the last moment. A customer’s support call must be scheduled with the team, not with an individual team member.

Reserve the Right to Profitable Support

Running your customer support department as a profit center rather than a cost center is becoming more common as the business environment changes.

The problem: how to give support to only those customers that are paying for it?

The solution: never distribute a support channel (like an email address, a phone number, or an appointment scheduling link) that can be reused or shared with others.

Existing Tools Work for Sales and Individual Meeting Scheduling, Not Support

Calendly offers round-robin scheduling and Managed Events. Both features are great, but fail to meet all of the requirements for team-based support.

SavvyCal offers round-robin scheduling with fairness and availability optimization. This is also a great feature, but still doesn’t meet all of our requirements.

Acuity Scheduling is optimized for booking services like haircuts and personal trainers, but offers zero tools for team-based support scheduling.

Headset Army is For Efficient (Even Profitable!) Support Teams

Our support call scheduler is made for team-based support. We put the organization in control and ensure adhering to an efficient support process is the rule, not the exception.