Is Outlook letting you down? Here’s how to fix it for that perfect meeting experience

You want that perfect meeting. You need it. But “just use Outlook” = trouble, no matter how big your company is.

Here’s why:

You struggle to juggle multiple booking elements while using plain old Outlook.

You can book rooms, but not the AV you need. Then you find a way to put AV in the notes, but now the guests have special meal requirements.

Then disaster – all the team members and the client are on the meeting notice, but the whole meeting gets bumped two days.

Will you remember all of the fields, files, sticky notes and emails that need to change for all the things not included in that Outlook meeting?

Many other organizations are exploring ways to digitize and streamline their workflow and business processes, but they find many booking scenarios remain disjointed when using Outlook.

The truth is, for complex organizations, plain Outlook just won’t cut it. And in these days of sophisticated meeting room booking software, that’s becoming more and more plain.

Using “just Outlook”, eventually something is missed, and your meeting starts off on the wrong foot, or worse yet, doesn’t happen at all. There is nothing more embarrassing than a client showing up when your team is booked or out of office.

Here’s where Outlook lets you down

When using Outlook, you cannot book the room and required vended services such as catering in a single process. Instead, you have to have to:

• Find your meeting space by opening each individual room calendar to check availability via the scheduling assistant. You have to repeat this laborious task until a vacant slot appears
• Call or email the catering team to request refreshments for your meeting, letting them know where they need to deliver to.

This means you have to know the business rules, notification and cut off times for each item, and also time for setup and breakdown – a big ask.

For some items, you may have to provide a cost code or client chargeback details, depending on whether your meeting is internal or client-facing.

In reality, there’s a time-consuming dialogue between you and the service provider, because details have to be added to progress or decline the request.

And what if the meeting changes? Ouch.

If any details change, including amendments to refreshments or location, your manual slog of telling the service provider just goes on and on.

You’re a busy person, so it’s easy to forget, too – and that means the wrong items are delivered to the wrong room at the wrong time.

It doesn’t make you or your organization look slick, that’s for sure.

If your meeting is cancelled, it’s a common mistake to cancel the room reservation, but forget the service providers, which leads to waste and unnecessary catering costs.

Did you know: Many large enterprises report catering waste of up to $500,000 annually.

Booking just with Outlook takes more than 10 minutes on average.

No big deal, if you have only a few meetings to organize. But when you add it up across a larger enterprise with a complex meeting schedule, and factor in the lost business from making mistakes, “Just use Outlook” can cost you the growth your company seeks.

Q. So if Outlook is broken for you, how do you fix it and create that perfect meeting experience?

With fully integrated meeting room booking software.

With meeting room booking software at your fingertips, you follow just 4 quick and simple steps to book your full-service meeting:

• Choose your meeting space type, date, time and the number of attendees
• Choose the room you want from the search results
• Select from the vended services available for that specific room
• Confirm your booking.

Your smart meeting room booking software takes away the grind – automatically.

1. 1. It applies all business rules, notifications, and cut-offs, set up and break down times
2. 2. It notifies the relevant service teams via email and through a service tracker which collates and displays all tasks in time order
3. 3. It updates the service provider if you make any changes to the booking – a simple process
4. 4. If you cancel the meeting, all associated deliverables will automatically be cancelled too
5. 5. It enters all relevant cost codes are entered at the booking stage so they can be reported on and processed without time-consuming cross-checking.

Booking with meeting room booking software takes less than 30 seconds on average.

If you’re a busy PA making 100 bookings a month, you just saved over 15 hours.

By eliminating mistakes, errors, double bookings and client problems, that saving is a great deal more.

Not to mention the benefits it brings to your organization’s productivity and wellbeing by removing frustration and lifting the drudgery of tedious manual tasks.

So, you can keep using Outlook. It’s just money and time wasted, no big deal, right?

Wrong.

Download our brochure and set up a demo for Rendezvous meeting room booking software instead, which integrates fully with Outlook and 365.

Why waste another minute when you could be helping your organization to hold the perfect meetings that spark growth?

• Download Brochure