An appointment always takes place between at least two persons or different groups of persons. The result is a date and a time at which an event agreed between these persons or groups of persons is to take place. The appointment is always preceded in some form by an appointment request. The initial appointment request often leads to a mutual appointment scheduling process. Nowadays, many formal appointment requests are mostly made online.
What sounds relatively formal here can also be quite trivial in everyday life. However, in the context of large projects, in which there are many dependencies between groups of people, trades, etc., there are also very complex scheduling agreements that require regular scheduling. In the end, however, it can always be reduced to a scheduling agreement between a few people. Below are a few examples of everyday appointment arrangements:
Examples of appointments
Everyone knows them and participates in such appointments, consciously or unconsciously, pretty much every day:
- Making a doctor’s appointment/dentist’s appointment
- Appointment with friends
- Hairdresser appointment
- Invitation to a birthday
- Meetings at work
- Club meetings
The list could go on indefinitely.
Possibilities of appointment requests
The way of making an appointment request usually depends on the event in question and on the relationship with the group of people with whom the appointment is to be made.
It is possible to make an appointment request face to face. This applies to many occasions in the professional world or in everyday life, such as for meetings, doctor’s appointments, etc. Alternatively, such appointments are also made by phone.
WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook, and the like are more likely to be used in the private sphere, although these services are also increasingly finding their way into the business world.
In addition, there are Internet platforms, such as Doodle, which enable appointments to be coordinated by providing a choice of several possible dates, on which the various participants can then vote in order to select the largest possible common intersection.
Furthermore, appointments can be coordinated via e-mail and the Internet. As a physician, craftsman, lawyer, notary, or service offerer, of any kind one has today often its own Internet operational readiness level in form of a web page. On this one can offer directly a form for the date agreed to its customers and clients.
Appointment request form
Advantages of online appointment requests
The big advantage of online appointment requests is that they are decoupled from the actual work. Usually, the customer would come in through the door or the phone would ring and you are interrupted in your actual work. This means that appointment requests can be processed separately in a dedicated time slot.
In addition, the appointment requests are then immediately available in electronic form as structured data, so that they can be easily transferred to and synchronized with an electronic appointment calendar. With the appropriate software tools in the background, a great deal could be automated, including the automatic sending of appointment confirmations.
Structure of form for appointment request
The form for an appointment request should contain fields for some personal data as well as appointment-specific fields. Of course, this may vary depending on the specific use case. However, the following fields should be included as a minimum:
- Salutation
- First name
- Last name
- Phone
- from the following date
- from/at a certain time
- on certain days of the week
- additional information
As you can see, this is an appointment request that still leaves some freedom to find an appointment, since the customer/client only specifies possible time periods. This allows the service provider to select the next possible appointment that also suits the customer/client.