- New tool gives users the ability to vote on preferred meeting times to make multi-person scheduling convenient and collaborative – without the ads
As part of its vision to offer workers more meeting tools to conveniently connect and collaborate, Calendly, the modern scheduling platform for high-performing teams and individuals, introduced Meeting Polls, a new all-in-one tool giving users the ability to poll and vote on preferred meeting times. Users can poll attendees outside or within their organization to easily identify the most popular time to meet while accommodating personal preferences and time zones when scheduling with three or more people.
“Coordinating meetings with students and stakeholders across educational institutions, departments, and nonprofits can be quite time-consuming when you’re managing multiple time zones and each individual’s availability”
Current scheduling processes are manual, entail sending multiple emails back and forth, and often don’t account for time zones and personal preferences. The more people added to an invite, the more complicated scheduling becomes. With people working across more time zones than ever before and the rise of asynchronous work causing a shift in “normal” hours, Meeting Polls means both hosts and invitees can collaborate and communicate over their availability. Hosts are more informed and have visibility into when invitees prefer to meet to make a quick educated decision when scheduling directly within the Calendly platform.
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“Meeting Polls gives our users the flexibility and power to manage their time as both a host and an invitee – it’s all about finding mutual availability among multiple people in a hassle-free way,” said Srinivas Somayajula, head of product operations at Calendly. “We’re building for the distributed workforce, and we couldn’t be more excited to roll this out to users at such a pivotal moment as a solution to a challenge we’ve all faced.”
In a survey led by Calendly, 63% of customers said finding the best time for a group to meet was their most critical need when it came to scheduling; 80% said they don’t currently have a tool to help them solve this challenge.
“Hybrid work and everything that it touches is being refined and reinvented these days so it’s only natural we sought out a new way to provide two-way insight into meeting availability preferences in the most efficient way possible,” said Tope Awotona, founder and CEO of Calendly. “Meeting Polls simplifies cross-organizational collaboration, productivity, and scheduling as more workers look to protect their time and apply it meaningfully from wherever they call the office.”
Meeting Polls’ ad-free functionality is sophisticated and intuitive, aligned with Calendly’s simple, clean interface users have come to love. Unlike other polling tools, users can easily poll and schedule a meeting in a single workflow through Calendly without having to switch between multiple tools. Users can send an unlimited number of polls each month while accessing popular video conferencing platform integrations like Zoom and Webex.
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Meeting Polls can be used for a variety of use cases.
- Educators and students can simplify scheduling for hosting faculty meetings and group projects: Meeting Polls means less time wasted on coordinating group availability and more time to devote towards strategic collaboration.
- Sales and marketers can meet with clients, board members, and executives faster for high-priority meetings while delivering a superior customer experience: Meeting Polls helps close deals faster when working with multiple stakeholders across multiple time zones to schedule demos, negotiate pricing, or conduct security reviews.
- Administrative assistants, consultants, and agencies – roles known for living by their calendars and managing others’ – can streamline scheduling high-priority meetings with outside invitees while impressing clients and executives with an easy booking experience in the process.
University of Southern Mississippi Assistant Professor of the Center for STEM Education Maria F.G. Wallace, Ph.D., has already seen the value of Meeting Polls firsthand from using the beta.
“Coordinating meetings with students and stakeholders across educational institutions, departments, and nonprofits can be quite time-consuming when you’re managing multiple time zones and each individual’s availability,” said Wallace. “Now I can solve this challenge in one central platform without the back and forth emails. Meeting Polls is essential for making short and long-term partnership collaboration easy and efficient, a must in education.”
Meeting Polls is available today as a global public beta. Users have unlimited access to Meeting Polls from any Calendly plan, including Basic. Further enhancements will be coming to Meeting Polls by mid-2022.
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