In this pop-up episode, Jim interviews Tyler Blair, an account executive with Apptoto; an online scheduling software. Jim’s have been using this software in his Firm and they’re really happy with it. Listen as they go over its different features and advantages.
Topics:
- About Tyler
- 2 and a half years in Apptoto
- Answering emails and phone calls; problem solving and troubleshooting
- Support
- What Apptoto is
- Reminders for anyone who needs it
- Automated solutions
- Persistent communication with client
- Flexible service: customizable
- Rules
- Robust platform
- Booking pages
- Most popular feature
- Eliminate back and forth communication
- It looks directly at your calendars and it’s able to present availability to your clients
- Multiple schedules
- Individual booking pages
- Set up single calendar or multiple calendars
- Flexibility and customizability
- User friendly
- Straight forward configuration
- Calendar integration
- Integration with a lot of calendars
- Automation
- Google integration
- Reminders
- Text, voice calls and email
- Voice calls
- Robo voice
- Upload recorded MP3
- Respond directly
- Zapier integration
- No show tracking
- Mark appointments
- GIFT: Anybody who signs up by the end of the year gets 50% off for the first three months.
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Transcripts: Online Scheduling Service For Lawyers ft. Tyler Blair, with Apptoto
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast podcast.
Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum lawyer podcast. This is a special pop up edition with my friend Tyler Blair. Tyler is a account executive with apt todo app total is a online scheduling piece of software that we’ve been using here at the hacking law practice for about two months now. We’re really happy with it. So we thought we’d shoot this pop up episode, to introduce you guys to Tyler and to app toto in general. Tyler, thanks for being here.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, happy to be here.
Jim Hacking
So tell us a little bit about yourself. How long have you been with App Toto? What’s your job? And what do you spend your time doing during the week?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, so I’ve been with App toto for about two and a half years now, my daily kind of standard routine involves a lot of answering emails and phone calls, a lot of problem solving, and just general troubleshooting. And my role tends to be more in the support side of things. So I do a lot of those kind of puzzling things all day, figuring out, you know, what little things may be causing the weird hiccups or Hangouts that you’re noticing. And most of the time, it’s, it’s a pretty fun job where I get to just kind of use that problem solving muscle in my brain.
Jim Hacking
How would you explain what app toto is?
Tyler Blair
Good question. So the elevator pitch that I always give people is, you know, the standard reminders that you get from your dentist reminding you that you got to get your teeth cleaned, we basically offer that for anybody who needs it. So if you have an appointment volume that was too big for you to be able to call everybody manually, we offer a solution that automates everything for you.
Jim Hacking
And that’s really terrific. That’s been on our end, something that’s really been helpful, not having to call all of our clients the next day or the appointments the next day. And getting that confirmation. I think those two things. One is it lets us know that the people are coming in to it also, I think gets them a little bit more committed to actually showing up.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that’s what we’ve noticed that idea of just kind of hitting them with a few reminders leading up to the actual day of their event seems to be really effective, as opposed to just the kind of manual, hey, you’re gonna be here for next Tuesday? Sure, we’ll see you then. And then, you know, things happen in the meantime, and things tend to slip people’s minds. But this automated side of things, allows you to more easily set up persistent communication with the client. So that way, you can, you know, say send them a reminder text the week ahead of time, sent him an email two days before and then maybe a call the morning of their event to say, hey, don’t forget you’re meeting with us at x time today. So yeah, it’s a really, really flexible service in that regard to that allows you to customize the timing of your messages, the contents of all your messages, as well as any rules for those messages to follow, like, only send a message a to appointments, if they contain a special keyword, Send Message me to appointments with a different keyword, etc. So it’s a really, really robust platform.
Jim Hacking
It really is a robust platform, I’ve been sort of blown away, you know, we were using appointment core for a while. And it’s a whole lot more sophisticated than what what we’ve been working with. And I’ve also had some experience with Calendly. And I’ve just been very impressed by how powerful it is. Let me ask you about the booking pages, talk to our listeners about booking pages and how those work.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, so the booking pages is actually one of our most popular features. That feature is really designed to eliminate that back and forth of hey, I’ve got availability next week, what time works for you. And then trying to you know, narrow down those overlapping times, what the booking page does is it looks directly at your calendars, and is able to present your availability to your clients in an online web booking tool. So this allows your clients to see exactly what times are available on your calendar already, you know, cross reference that with their own calendar, and then pick a time that works for everybody. When they do that they’re automatically placed on the calendar, and they start to automatically qualify for those automated reminder messages. So the whole process is really designed to be completely automated in that sense, to get your clients easily in the door at the time that they know that works for everybody, and ensure that they don’t forget that that is supposed to be happening.
Jim Hacking
How does it work with multiple like for US attorneys? We have multiple attorneys who have different schedules, how does it all work together?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, so each individual booking page, you can set up to use a single calendar for reference or you can have a setup for multiple calendars. Either way, the availability for those specific booking pages is going to be highly flexible, you can tell it you know specific days, I want to be shown as available from four till six or you know, on other days, I want to be open from 10 to three and then you can easily say You know, I only want to have people booked times if there’s nothing else there or we have the ability to say if an appointment exists with this appointment title like say available, then only those types should be presented to the client. So there’s really, really a super high degree of flexibility there that you can set it up so that each individual calendar has its own unique booking page, and they can all have their own separate availa ability for all of those as well. Yeah, from our standpoint, it’s been really good because there’s some people who specifically want to meet with me. And I can send them a link to my booking pages. And we have ones on there for 50 minute face to face consults. We have 25 minutes, Skype, cancelled link and a 25 minute, phone consults link. And that’s been really nice. And then also, then there’s some people who just want to get in as fast as possible. And we’re able to send them a different link that incorporates all the attorneys who do consults, schedules, and they can pick the one that’s the soonest for them, which is what they usually want. Yeah, exactly. We have that designed to be as flexible as possible for those kinds of situations where if you want to have like a different booking page for those kind of last minute people that need to get in quickly, as opposed to your standard booking page with your typical appointment types and lengths. Yeah, it’s going to have an incredibly high degree of flexibility and customizability. So that way, it can fit with most pre existing workflows and setups.
Jim Hacking
Do you find the most people are able to set up the app toto app on their own? Or do they need help? Or how user friendly? Would you say it is?
Unknown Speaker
It’s fairly user friendly. We’re always working to improve that. Obviously, with any kind of software, you want to make sure that the user experience is as friendly as possible. Right now, it kind of depends on the specific user. We’ve got some people who are incredibly tech savvy and managed to figure this stuff out. Well, before we even ask if they need any help. Sometimes we get people who just have a little bit of a hard time grasping some of the concepts. But for the most part, we find that users are able to get their account configured in at least a fairly straightforward manner to get messages sent out at a, like I said, a fairly straightforward kind of just base level.
Jim Hacking
We’re talking today with Tyler Blair. He’s an account executive with up toto there was one of our bonus pop up episode. That’s a piece of software that we’ve been using here at the hacking law practice for a while that we’re real happy with. Tyler, talk to us a little bit about calendar integration, how does it sync with say, Outlook or Google Calendar?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, so we’ve got quite a few different options for that, whether you guys are using Clio calendar, Salesforce, Google Calendar, Outlook, we’ve got quite a few different ways to integrate that information. But once that information is connected, what we do is we bring in all of the events for that specific calendar, and will scan the entirety of those events. So the titles, the descriptions, anybody who you may have invited via the I believe it’s the invitees list is the kind of universal term for that. But we’ll scan through the entirety of those appointments for phone numbers, email addresses, and properly cases first and last names will automatically extract all of that to then use for actual contact purposes. So that way, you can easily just indicate, you know, I need to contact Bob Smith at this number for this appointment. At total, we’ll see that turn him into the participant for that event, and then send him those automated messages.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, that was sort of crazy. When we first started with Toto. You know, we already had a lot of upcoming appointments with clients. And we always put the client first name, last name and cell phone number into the Google Calendar and app todo once we set up the sync was going out and grabbing that contact information and automatically notifying people before we’d really even done anything.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, the Google integration is probably our most robust at this point, they offer us a virtually immediate sync rate. So basically, as soon as a change is made on one side, it’s reflected on the other. So you can basically set up your appointments in the Google Calendar, app total will grab that and start acting on it pretty much immediately.
Jim Hacking
And so it’s not just text reminders, right? You can also do other kinds of reminders.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, that’s correct. We currently offer text voice calls and emails, we are looking to expand the the different types of messaging. But at the moment, those are the three that we offer, are the voice calls work? Yeah, the voice calls work that by default, we just read everything in a mail Robo voice. But we do offer the ability for you to upload pre recorded mp3 to have a more personalized kind of human touch to those reminders. But basically, we’ll send those from a either a reserved phone number or the actual phone number of your office or cell phone. And then basically, it operates the same way as our standard text messages and email reminders and just relaying the appointment time and information as well as any other custom information that you want to include. And just allows the customer to easily respond directly to that message to confirm, cancel or request the Reschedule of their events. So
Jim Hacking
it’s sort of like those announcements I get from the kids school where it says, you know, this is principal Smith from Mason Ridge Elementary, and this is what you need to know, but it would be giving them the details of the appointment.
Unknown Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, the default we just give you kind of the generic language that includes all the relevant information. And so that’s just provides you a good starting point to be able to tack on other relevant info like please bring documents a b and c to this event, or please show up a little bit ahead of time. I’m whatever kind of information that you need to relay to those clients.
Jim Hacking
I’m glad we’re doing this call because I didn’t know that was possible. So I’m excited about looking into that. Oh, excellent. Hey, listen to a lot of our listeners are big on Zapier. Do you guys integrate with Zapier? Do you have web hooks that allow you to sort of build off of app todo?
Unknown Speaker
We do. Actually. That’s one of our newest features. It’s relatively minimally used at this point, just because it seems like it’s new enough that people aren’t super aware of it. So this may actually help us get some more use on that feature. But yeah, we absolutely do integrate with Zapier, we’ve got a few other web hooks that we can kind of integrate with as well. But off the top of my head, I don’t have a whole lot of detail on that at the moment.
Jim Hacking
Sure, no problem. So what kinds of use cases have you seen work best with avtodor? Like, what are some success stories that you can tell our listeners about?
Unknown Speaker
Sure, well, we’ve got a few different success stories that are on our websites. The Homewood baseball one is actually a really cool story, they, they managed to use our service in a way that was kind of unexpected, but ended up working incredibly smoothly for them for basically, organizing all the volunteers for their kind of local youth baseball teams, it’s a really cool story, they did a really good write up on it. And that’s actually going to be on our website, I can give you a link to that in just a little bit here. The most common use cases, though, that we tend to see are a sort of like cascade of messages, if you will. So like I was saying earlier, how you can send an SMS a week before an email two days before and the call the morning of that sort of workflow seems to be the most effective because it gets the the appointment in the clients mind early, gives them the ability to reply with the confirmation of cancellation. And then it continues to remind them leading up to that start time. Because, you know, as we all know that life happens and things slip people’s minds. So the most successful setups that we’ve seen have been those cascading series of reminders.
Jim Hacking
And there’s also a feature Tyler’s in there that sort of after the appointment occurs, that he’s ever meeting with the people or someone at the front desk can sort of identify who actually showed up and who were no shows.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, yeah, we do have no show tracking that’s been implemented as well. So that allows you to easily mark an appointment as late or if they arrived if they were a no show. So that way, you can easily see okay, yeah, this person has been a chronic no show, or we may not want to do business with them in the future. It just allows you to further track more information about your events. Alright, great. Well,
Jim Hacking
Tyler, obviously, I’m told I’ve been a big fan of avtodor, since we started using it, how should our listeners get in contact with you or get in contact with avtodor? To get started? Do you have any sort of trial offers or anything that we can share with them? Yeah, absolutely,
Unknown Speaker
we do offer a free 15 day trial that has full features and functionality of the service. So you can test out everything to see exactly how it’s going to work with your existing workflows. And that is all visible and available to everybody at app todo.com/sign up, it’ll walk you through that process, we do have a pretty new Onboarding Tool that will help you get started with setting up your account and kind of take care of some of the small steps for you. And then beyond that, we do offer product demos. So during that onboarding process, there’ll be prompted to sign up for a time with one of our reps, they may end up very well talking to me or one of our other employees here. And then during those times, we can go over any questions that they may have kind of go through and get some of the basics startup and account setup going. And really just take up any kind of questions or anything at that time.
Jim Hacking
Awesome. Tyler, this has been very helpful, I think our listeners are gonna get a lot out of it. And I think anytime people are talking about more automation and less sort of doing it yourself, you know, back and forth trying to schedule things, I think that the amount of time that people would save would really pay for app todo itself.
Unknown Speaker
Absolutely, yeah, we find that this has been an incredible return on investment for just about everybody who has used it. The idea here being that we just free up all that time that would otherwise be spent on the phone kind of repetitiously calling everybody you’re able to go do whatever else needs to be done in the in the office and the business, what have you and still rely on those customers getting notified of their events?
Jim Hacking
You know, that reminds me I should probably just ask you ballpark what is app todo go for a month or how does it work pricing wise?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, so we got a few different pricing plans, all of them are visible at app todo.com/pricing. And all of the different tiers there will offer the same basic account features and functionality, the primary differences just going to be however many calendars that you need to have connected to the service and the total appointment volume across those calendars.
