Scheduling links, or meeting links, have been around for over a decade, entering the productivity scene to optimize how professionals coordinate a time to meet. In order to save people the trouble (and serious waste of time) of exchanging back-and-forth emails to figure out when both people are free, they can simply share their availability through a scheduling link to allow another person to pick the time that works best for them. 

Sounds like a foolproof solution – right?

Unfortunately, scheduling links have come under fire for lots of issues in recent years. For one, 54.6% of people who use meeting links struggle to even offer enough available open time slots for invitees to choose from. On top of that, they’re facing issues prioritizing their urgent meetings, offering flexible scheduling options, and navigating sharing etiquette that have caused many people to just do away with them for good. Which means they’re back to manually sending time slots over email, often to find none of those times actually work, or the ones you proposed are now booked with something new. Looks like another email is due!

As a smart calendar app, our users were very actively requesting a better scheduling link tool to get around the issues they were having using their existing meeting links. And since our users are already time blocking their priorities in Reclaim through our tasks, habits, meetings, and breaks scheduling features – we knew there was a major opportunity to optimize the process for both the inviter and invitee. 

So we got to work! But before we built the feature, we asked thousands of users through a detailed survey – how are you using meeting links today, and what issues do you need solved for better scheduling? And months after the product launched, we asked again about their top issues and how their meeting scheduling has improved with Reclaim Scheduling Links.

In this blog post report, we break down the ROI and performance advantages of Scheduling Links at Reclaim reported by our users. Here’s a sneak peak at the ROI results:

• 524% increase in scheduling links open available time slots
• Meetings booked 15.3% sooner 
• 75.2% reduction in ease of use issues 
• 78.8% reduction in rescheduling & canceling meetings via links issues
• 64.5% reduction in prioritization issues (offer more availability for high priority meetings)
• 77.4% reduction in flexibility of links issues (prefer 30 mins, but would take 20 mins)
• 92.4% of people prefer Reclaim’s scheduling links over Calendly

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Quick overview on Reclaim’s “smart” Scheduling Links

Before we get into the data, let’s walk through a quick overview of how Reclaim Scheduling Links work vs. other meeting tools on the market.

As mentioned above, Reclaim is a smart scheduling app that helps you automatically find the best time for your tasks, habits, 1:1 meetings, and breaks in your calendar – and sync your availability across multiple calendars to prevent work-life balance interruptions. The AI automatically plans your workweek around your priorities, while still keeping your schedule flexible for changes through smart “free”/”busy” event setting codes. For example, if you created a Habit for ‘Lunch’ to schedule every weekday between 11-2pm, Reclaim would block time for that lunch event as “free”, until your calendar starts to fill up and you run out of opportunities to reschedule, where it would then flip that event to “busy” to lock in that time.

Now to Reclaim Scheduling Links – since users are already scheduling their recurring Habits, Task work, and 1:1 meetings through Reclaim smart events, we built the same intelligence into our Scheduling Links.

The two major differentiators with Reclaim’s Scheduling Links vs. other products on the market are our high-priority and flexible duration meeting controls. You can create high-priority Scheduling Links for your most important meetings which will show available openings over all of your Habits, Tasks, and Smart Meeting events (even if they’re marked as busy) – to offer your max availability. Additionally, our flexible durations allow you to add up to 3 different meeting durations to a single Scheduling Link so incoming schedulers can choose a shorter time in order to get that meeting booked sooner.

So, say you’re a busy product manager who needs to get time with a customer in the next couple of days, but have a jam-packed calendar. Instead of sending them a meeting link that’s completely out of availability, you can send them a high-priority link with flexible durations to surface times that you could actually reprioritize for them.

69.2% fewer issues with Reclaim Scheduling Links

Let’s start with the top problems people faced when sharing availability and booking meetings through links – and how those same issues scored after using Reclaim’s smart Scheduling Links:

Improvement using Reclaim Scheduling Links vs. other meeting links

Amazingly, almost every major pain point category was reduced by over 60% when users switched from another meeting link tool to Reclaim’s Scheduling Links, averaging a 69.1% improvement across the board. Maximizing availability was one of our top goals for the new product, and that scored highest at almost an 80% improvement. Sharing etiquette even improved almost 40%, as people felt more confident sharing a link to their availability knowing that the scheduler would actually have options to choose from – creating a better experience for the people they’re meeting with.

• 79.5% availability improvement: Offering open time slots over events that can be auto-rescheduled.
• 39.2% sharing etiquette improvement: Sending links without coming off as rude. 
• 75.2% ease of use improvement: Easier user experience using Reclaim.
• 78.8% rescheduling/cancellation improvement: For meetings booked via links.
• 64.5% prioritization improvement: For higher-priority vs. non-urgent meetings.
• 77.4% link flexibility improvement: Allowing invitees to schedule sooner with a shorter duration. 

524% increase in open time slots via Scheduling Links

Sending a booking link with no availability for the next two weeks doesn’t exactly give the impression that you really care about getting this meeting scheduled. It’s no wonder people argued that meeting booking links could come across as rude!

So, we asked our Scheduling Link users: How much additional availability (open time slots) have you been able to create with Reclaim's smart Scheduling Links?

The result? People were able to offer over 5x as many open time slots sharing Reclaim Scheduling Links vs. other booking links. Rather than sharing a standard 60-minute meeting link when you definitely don’t have lots of free hours available in your busy calendar – Reclaim lets you add up to 3 flexible meeting durations to a single link. So, while an hour might not be available this week, a scheduler could get in tomorrow by compromising with a 45-minute time slot in your schedule. All from the same URL.  

Not only does this help create more availability for your meetings – it also gets ahead of awkward etiquette problems by actually giving the invitee control over how much time they need, and when they can get in on your busy calendar. A win-win! 

But what about your most important meetings, that you’d be happy to move things around on your calendar to accommodate? Reclaim high-priority Scheduling Links allows you to offer up your maximum availability by automatically showing Reclaim smart events - like Tasks, Habits, and Smart Meetings – as available times to the scheduler. And if they pick the time tomorrow where your lunch Habit was originally scheduled, Reclaim auto-reschedules it to accommodate your new priority meeting – no manual calendar reshuffling required!

Meetings booked 15.3% sooner via Scheduling Links

We all know meetings are often time-sensitive events – you wouldn’t want to schedule time with a partner next week when they’re coordinating a campaign going live this Friday. So if you have a jam-packed schedule, you need smarter automation to find time that could be available. 

On average, meetings were booked 9.6 days out through competitor Scheduling Links before Reclaim. The goal of Reclaim’s Scheduling Links was simple: to let users book the right meetings sooner. By offering more availability and flexibility with our new Scheduling Links tool vs. existing tools on the market – users report scheduling their meetings 1.5 days sooner with Reclaim, or 8.2 days out, on average. A big difference in today's fast-paced workspace.

This improvement includes both urgent high-priority and normal Scheduling Links, which would be much sooner with the 524% increase in availability only considering the meetings sent through high-priority links. But many people don’t want to book right away! We’ve all experienced sharing a meeting link and asking the person to grab time with us next week, to see moments later that they booked an event for that afternoon. For the non-urgent meetings you want to prioritize at a later date – you can customize your Scheduling Links to only present openings after a certain date, or the start of the next bookable day or week – giving you better control over when your meeting can be scheduled.

Almost 3x less manual event clearing

If you’re a heavy scheduling link user, you’ll definitely know this pain. There’s nothing worse than sharing a link with zero availability for days, if not weeks, out on your calendar. And it doesn’t leave the best impression when you send that meeting link to an important contact to get something booked asap.

So what are people doing to make room for new meetings on their scheduling links? Manually clearing events from their calendar to create availability – not exactly efficient for a productivity tool that’s supposed to save you time.

When we first surveyed over 800 professionals, only 18.8% of people using competitors meeting links reported NEVER having to do this. Today with Reclaim, that number is up 52.3% – meaning almost 3x as many people no longer have to clear availability on their calendars for new meetings with Reclaim’s Scheduling Links.

That means 81.2% of people were manually clearing events from their calendars before sending a booking link prior to using Reclaim, and only 47.7% now ever have to do it with Reclaim’s smarter Scheduling Links. 

Additionally, 15.8% of people who were manually clearing events from their calendar 70% or more of the time before sending a meeting link with a competitor - and that number is down to 3.7% using Reclaim - a 76.5% improvement! That’s a whole lot of recovered time for more high-value productive work.

Reclaim vs. Calendly - 92.4% prefer Reclaim over Calendly

Calendly is one of the most popular scheduling automation tools, but 61.7% of Scheduling Link users at Reclaim actually switched over from Calendly. So what do those users think of Reclaim as a Calendly alternative? A whopping 92.4% prefer Reclaim’s Scheduling Links to Calendly’s meeting links.

While Calendly offers some advanced customizations that Reclaim doesn’t yet (there’s a lot in the works!) – Calendly links do not effectively address the three biggest issues reported by meeting link users before Reclaim: prioritization (60.5%), flexibility (57.8%), and availability (54.6%).

That’s why so many Calendly users are urgently switching over to Reclaim – they’re able to get the right meetings booked sooner, offer flexible options for their schedulers, and maximize their availability on their links. Interestingly, Calendly users preferred Reclaim at high rates after switching from both free and paid Calendly accounts:

• 87.1% prefer Reclaim after switching from a PAID Calendly plan
• 97.1% prefer Reclaim after switching from a FREE Calendly plan

For those 7.4% of users who prefer to stay with Calendly, the Reclaim product actually is able to enhance their scheduling experience through their Calendly account by maximizing their availability across any smart calendar event that hasn’t been locked to busy yet. You can check out this Calendly blog post to learn how Reclaim can improve your Calendly links.

Reclaim vs. other scheduling link tools - 76.9% prefer Reclaim

Outside of Calendly, 26.2% of people came from another scheduling link tool (including Motion, Clockwise, etc.). Out of these users, 78.9% say they prefer Reclaim Scheduling Links vs. the meeting link tool they were using before.

And only 12.2% of Reclaim Scheduling Link users are first-time meeting link users. Since Reclaim offers one free Scheduling Link in our free plan, and users are already automating their daily planning through Reclaim, it’s become another natural feature to automate the headache of scheduling.

Plus, Reclaim isn’t just a Scheduling Link tool. Users automatically plan out their entire workweeks across their team, finding the best time for their tasks, recurring routines, one-on-one meetings, and breaks to maintain a productive and work-life friendly schedule that prevents burnout across the organization.

Better experience for both meeting organizers & schedulers

Reclaim Scheduling Links were designed around the top issues meeting link users faced with existing tools on the market – and by making these a priority, we were able to improve the top 6 paint points by 69.1% on average across the board – resulting in a massive influx of users switching over entirely from their previous scheduling automation tool. 

While Reclaim is a great Calendly alternative, Scheduling Links are just one of the powerful features that helps users maximize their productivity every day! You can create a free  Scheduling Link at Reclaim to explore how you can get the right meetings booked sooner, and automatically plan out the perfect schedule for your workweek with smart time blocking for your tasks, habits, one-on-one meetings, and breaks.

Set up your free Scheduling Link →