Tech stack for booking customer appointments

[Stuart_Walker]

Hi All,
I've been struggling with sorting out a tech stack to solve a process we use in the business so thought I'd ask the hive mind.

We have companies that we contract to.
Every six months they will send through a list of properties we need to inspect. The properties have tenants in them.
At the moment, we email the tenants and tell them we wish to visit on say the 20th of the following month. We ask them to indicate an AM or PM preference.
They then email back, and my Ops team complete a job sheet with timed visits for an inspector on that day. In general, we'll visit 20 properties a day and try to group them relatively close together so there is sort of a route.

If they don't email back we email again and finally call.
This feels like it 'should' be easy to automate but all the solutions I come up with either don't have the functionality I need so I need more than one app or they cost a fortune.

Has anybody used anything successfully that looks like it might help me?

 

[Daybooks]

If it were me ‘I’ would build a simple Microsoft Excel solution incorporating Microsoft Outlook (others no doubt possible) for the emailing to handle the whole process.

I say ‘I’ but would write out the full specification and give to my trusted external developer.

In the meantime good luck with finding a suitable App.

 

[EnterprisePro]

You could use something like HubSpot with its meetings pages, where you can constrain the dates and times to the ones you need and then have it linked with your MS365 or Google Workspace calendar (if you use any of them). There's Calendly as well, but others who've used it could comment on it better.

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

What do you mean by 'tech stack'? The platform to build on? Linux, Apache, PHP, etc.

There are trades focussed SAAS systems (maybe like Tradify) that could probably do that.

Some CRM systems could probably manage this.

There are probably some self hosted packages you can get.

You could probably build something on Wordpress, with the right plugins.

 

[fisicx]

It’s really just a process. You could automate most of it including tasking the inspectors.

I’ve just finished a project for a client where we do something similar all in Wordpress. Cost for this sort of project isn’t extortionate.

 

[Stuart_Walker]

Thanks for the answers.

I have actually 'solved' part of the problem by using Zoho Desk to manage the appointment and customer contact side. Not perfect but better than we had.
Now will move on to automating other parts.

 

[Ahmed Afzal]

Hi All,
I've been struggling with sorting out a tech stack to solve a process we use in the business so thought I'd ask the hive mind.

We have companies that we contract to.
Every six months they will send through a list of properties we need to inspect. The properties have tenants in them.
At the moment, we email the tenants and tell them we wish to visit on say the 20th of the following month. We ask them to indicate an AM or PM preference.
They then email back, and my Ops team complete a job sheet with timed visits for an inspector on that day. In general, we'll visit 20 properties a day and try to group them relatively close together so there is sort of a route.

If they don't email back we email again and finally call.
This feels like it 'should' be easy to automate but all the solutions I come up with either don't have the functionality I need so I need more than one app or they cost a fortune.

Has anybody used anything successfully that looks like it might help me?

Hi Stuart,That process is a classic case where off-the-shelf tools often don’t fit because of the mix of: tenant comms, slot choice (AM/PM), job sheet creation, and route grouping. A lot of people end up thinking “this should be easy to automate” and then hit the same wall you’re describing.In practice, this usually needs either a few tools wired together (e.g. a simple booking form → spreadsheet/CRM → job sheet and maybe a route optimiser) or one small custom flow that does: tenant link → pick slot → auto job sheet + suggested route for the day.I help UK businesses automate exactly this kind of process—often where the gap is between “what we do manually” and “what existing software does.” I’m happy to do a short free audit of your flow and sketch what a minimal tech stack (or one custom bit) could look like and roughly what it might cost. No obligation. If you’d like that, drop me a DM or reply here and we can take it from there.