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By Alyssa Levitz. Updated: Jan. 25, 2021 to note CT and KY have added this functionality
They have implemented an in-house call management system, focused on call scheduling. Here’s how they describe the current system:
Customers call the main claims center line. A triage agent handles basic triaging and addresses the needs if possible. If the need is more complex, then a callback is offered. The callback is scheduled by the agent via webpage using a tool from a company that specializes in event scheduling. Available time slots are verbally presented to the customer
In addition, they have the option for a self-service page where claimants can schedule their own appointment using the same method offered to the triage agent. This self-scheduling is currently turned off, as there was too much demand compared to allocated staff, and there were too many duplicate appointments being made.
Each day, agents look on a separate webpage that has all the callbacks listed. Agents have basic information collected by the triage agent to pre-scan before making the call.
In a survey of other states’ Departments of Labor / Unemployment Insurance Departments, we found two with easily accessible online appointment/callback scheduling.
Colorado: Leverages YouCanBook.me (https://youcanbook.me/): see it embedded at the bottom of their contact page even when appointments don’t exist. They do not mention when new appointment slots are made available, but none were available every time we’ve checked.
Michigan: They use Acuity (https://acuityscheduling.com/): They also have a separate page for the scheduler; unlike Alabama and Georgia, it still lets you start the process of finding an appointment slot even if none exist. They say, “New appointments become available throughout the day exactly 7 calendar days in advance (for example, on a Tuesday morning appointments for the following Tuesday morning become available).” None have been available any time we’ve checked.
Two other states have systems in place that seem to target the same solution area: the phone lines are long and unpredictable, so having known times makes the experience better for some.
Alabama: Alabama’s tool takes basic constituent information and assigns them a time and location (theirs is not for callbacks but actual in-person appointments). You can see it on this page, but it’s unlikely to show you much unless it’s a Friday afternoon at 5PM CT when they’ve opened up new time slots.
Georgia: It is not clear what Georgia’s functionality is or how they’ve implemented it, as no appointment slots have been available on the separate page they built. It’s clear that going through that flow will result in some kind of appointment made, but not apparent how that appointment time is chosen/set. New appointments are released Monday mornings at 8 AM ET.
Since this survey was initially published in early Dec. 2020, Connecticut and Kentucky have added online appointment scheduling, but those have not been looked into.
Potentially interesting to you is how state Departments of Motor Vehicles or Departments of Licensing have implemented their online scheduling systems, as their use case is similar to UI agencies (e.g., the need to collect enough information to know who a constituent is, there’s a known number of appointments available per time slot, and it doesn’t matter within a group whom a constituent speaks with).
Vendors in this space with known government contracts are:
Acuity (https://acuityscheduling.com/): Michigan’s Secretary of State
Nemo-q (https://nemo-q.com/): Georgia, North Dakota, and Utah state licensing departments; Washington, D.C.’s DMV; and Florida’s Broward, Miami-Dade, and Volusia counties’ departments of transportation
Qmatic (https://www.qmatic.com/): New York’s Monroe County
Vcita (https://www.vcita.com/): Hartsfield-Jackson: Atlanta International Airport; Florida’s Osceola County’s Circuit Court Clerk; Hawai’i’s Kaua’i’s and North Carolina’s DMVs; Kansas state department of Revenue;
Additional vendors with DMV-targeted offerings:
Setmore (https://www.setmore.com/dmv)
Q-less (https://www.qless.com/)
States with unique-seeming solutions for their DMVs:
Unknown: California, Indiana, Oregon,
Tool referred to as “Fortress”: Washington
There are three ways that the Candidate vendors price their tools: (1) per month, and (2) per month but different depending on the number of users, and (3) per user per month. Depending on the particulars of how the appointments made via this tool get surfaced to frontline agents, the vendors that charge per user per month could become astronomically expensive.
(1) Per month:
YouCanBook.Me: Their rate is actually per calendar per month, but given that you’d create some (likely small) number of calendars up-front, it’d be a known cost per month unrelated to the number of users you have. (Note: they might have discounts for government.)
Nemo-q: Their rate depends on the number of appointments you want to schedule a month.
(2) Per month, with a limit on the number of users at each pricing tier (i.e., the tier you choose is influenced by both functionality and the number of users needed -- but the cost doesn’t scale linearly with number of users):
Acuity
Appointy
FlexBooker
Vcita
(3) Per user per month (i.e., the cost scales linearly with number of users): This pricing set-up appears to be because the tool assumes that every agent would have a calendar within the product that gets synced to the “meta” calendar.
Calendly (Note: they might have discounts for government.)
Microsoft Booking (not actually known for certain that they charge per user per month, but it is the most likely case)
Microsoft Dynamics
Vcita (Note: they have discounts for government)
The evaluated vendors fall into three main categories, only one of which feels like a good match for the state UI agency's scenario: “General Appointment Scheduling,” which is also referred to as “Candidate” to reflect that match.
Healthcare appointment scheduling: These ones tend to have rich feature sets and good UX for the actual scheduling mechanics -- but are not as applicable in other ways that the agency would need. E.g., they may have only medical-specific intake forms (like uploading insurance information), or they don’t have integrations with CRMs (instead integrating with Electronic Health Record management systems). Several of them were also more focused on queue management than the actual scheduling of appointments.
Small service-sector business appointments: These vendors are targeting small businesses with a handful of employees for 1-1 or group appointments usually with a SPECIFIC individual. They also tend to offer a number of things that the agency wouldn’t use (like social media integration, payments integration, and marketing features), contributing to a higher price point than some of the other offerings.
General appointment scheduling: These vendors are targeting organizations or even individuals across sectors. Their systems are generic enough to be useful in a lot of scenarios, including the UI agency's, and so in this paper are referred to as “Candidates.” Some of these vendors have solutions targeting state Departments of Motor Vehicles or the equivalent, which is a useful comparison scenario for these purposes.
Microsoft Bookings: While the actual UX may not be that customizable, it has so many options, particularly around defining “service offerings” (what we would call “appointment types”) that would help it meet the needs of the organization.
Runners up: Both Vcita and Nemo-Q, with their targeted DMV offerings, appear to have all the configurability needed.
YouCanBook.me: This vendor does quite well with the various requirements against which we evaluated all the vendors, and its pricing model (per calendar per month) makes it the cheapest option. With the caveat that we're sure prices are negotiable, we're going to use an example to show why YouCanBook.me appears the best on price.
Say you wanted 3 calendars; it’d be $30/month (we think your use case could actually be served by appointment types within the same calendar, but we are using multiple calendars to make this comparison a little more starkly. To beat that monthly price, each vendor would only let you have the following number of users:
Acuity: 6 users, their “Growing” tier at $23/month
Appointy: 1 user, their “Growth” tier at $19.99/mo
Calendly: 3 users, their “Premium” tier at $8/user/mo; or 2 users, their “Pro” tier at $12/user/mo
FlexBooker: None
Microsoft Bookings: Unknown
Microsoft Dynamics: None
Nemo-Q: None
Vcita: 1 user, and it’s the “Essentials” tier that doesn’t have the functionality you’d need
Calendly: This was a bit of a hard one to determine without a sales call and demo, but at least from how their scheduling system was described, it seems like their “pooled availability” and/or “round robin scheduling” systems would be really great fits for what the agency is looking for -- and none of the other vendors at least so explicitly outlined a part of their service that would meet your needs.
Runners up: Any of the vendors with per-user calendars. It really depends on how you currently manage staff calendars and how you’d want that to integrate with the appointment scheduling solution.
Here’s how the state agency describes their high-level needs, and USDR’s notes about that requirement after looking at the first dozen vendors or so. To see the evaluation matrix along these and other dimensions, download this spreadsheet:
SaaS-based scheduling tool.
Ability to define # of appointments available based on # of agents.
As we look at the different tools, it doesn’t appear on the surface that any offer this particular functionality. However, 1) calls with sales reps could verify this, or 2) we can think about this a different way. E.g., you may have to figure out how many appointments you can manage per slot, and the question becomes: how easy is it for you to set and update that “schedule”?
Ability for customers to self-schedule their own appointments.
Almost all the evaluated providers have the ability for you to “embed” the tool within your own webpage; some additionally have the option for you to create your own experience and use their API, or for you to use a landing page that they provide for you.
Ability to prevent duplicate appointments being set by same individuals.
No tool mentioned this as a feature, but we can ask about it in sales calls.
Note: if the system does a good enough job sending a confirmation email/SMS right after the person books the appointment, we might not see as many duplicate bookings.
Alternative: We might also be able to think through a solution to put “on top” of the vendor’s implementation. The following is an example of a solution that could work depending on the UI system’s technical limitations:
Scheduling appointments would be available only after logging in. If the tool has webhook/API support, whenever someone schedules an appointment, it would let the state's UI system know that it had happened, and then remove the option for that person to schedule another appointment, showing instead “Appointment already scheduled” or something to that effect.
You could take this a step further and have the tool send you back information about when the person’s appointment actually is to display that and give them a clear way to cancel or reschedule.
Confirmation emails/reminders to customers:
Almost all tools have both confirmations and reminders. The biggest question is email vs. SMS. SMS costs more from many of the vendors but may be more effective at reducing no-shows.
Ability to customize forms for collecting information
The tools labeled as “candidates” in the spreadsheet all have this ability; however, some only have this ability in different pricing tiers. We’d want to clarify what kind of intake data you want and run that past the sales folks to understand the feasibility of your specific need.
Ability to see all callbacks scheduled and make agent notes and set indicators for those we were unable to reach:
All the vendors marked as “candidates” have some level of reporting, though it can vary by pricing tier.
It was not apparent with most of the vendors how you might annotate individuals as un-reached; that might be something that you integrate with your CRM or have an agent manually look up and note in another tool at their disposal. Vcita has this capability in its higher-cost tiers, as does Nemo-Q (both vendors used by state DMVs).
Form localization support, including callbacks in the chosen language:
I need to go back and look for localization support of the intake form and calendar interface.
Re: callbacks in the chosen language: this could be figured out by collecting that information as data in the intake form.
Ability set workgroups so callbacks can be schedule by certain teams:
This gets to the ideas of “users” and “access”, which are ill-defined in many descriptions of the tools’ features. This will likely become clearer when we’re able to talk to salespeople and describe our scenario to get feedback.
Various reporting capabilities for metrics/quality control:
Again, we’d want to know more about what specifically the agency is looking for to evaluate this furhter.
Additional desirable features:
Some form of integration capabilities with CRM:
Many of the candidates do have this via Zapier, which is another app that helps provide the connection between different systems.
Ability to standup multiple instances to take advantage of different divisions’ needs:
Most of the tools offer this in some manner, though some might be sleeker than others.
Dashboard view of callback status for staff performance/monitoring:
This seems beyond the scope of many of the tools, but it is something that we could ask about in a sales call. Likely the first sticking point would be the fact that people wanting a call back aren’t scheduling an appointment with a specific individual.
Evaluated:
Acuity Scheduling
Appointy
Calendly
DocPace
FlexBooker
Juvonno
LumaHealth
Microsoft Bookings
MS Dynamics
QLess
Schedulicity
Setmore
Solv
Square Appointments
Vagaro
vcita
You Can Book Me
Not evaluated:
Appointlet
AppointmentPlus
EZnet Scheduler
Genbook
Marketing360
Qmatic
SimplyBook.me
TimeTap