Summary
Using Odoo Appointments for a number of months as a replacement for Calendly led to reduced usability and minor increased labor costs, primarily due to lacking functionality and QA-issues. This prompted for a return to Calendly.
Introduction on Calendly
Invantive as a SaaS-company uses short sessions to on-board new companies. During such a session delegated users learn how to use the software and how to access other knowledge sources such as the forums and documentation. The sessions are free format with the goal of ensuring the company is ready for production use by the end of the session.
The sessions have an important impact on customer success, significantly increasing retention.
Links to Calendly were used from the mails sent through automations to schedule the sessions. Calendly also sends reminders shortly before the start and helps execute the sessions using Microsoft Teams.
Sessions are separated by 15 or 30 minutes to allow for completing internal notes such as improvement suggestions and short breaks. An employee typically completes at most sex sessions per day.
Odoo Appointments experiences
As part of the implementation of Odoo within Invantive, an effort was made to replace Calendly by Odoo’s Appointments on odoo.com. Odoo Appointsments is an app bundled without additional cost in most subscriptions. The Appointments app is for free and only the Odoo user price of EUR 37,40 applies for all apps used by a user.
After an implementation and testing period of approximately two weeks, all new meetings has been redirected from Calendly to Odoo Meetings.
In the following elements the switch from Calendly to Odoo Meetings led to advantages:
- Flexible customization to many languages makes worldwide customer service more accessible. Invantive implemented 14 languages across the website used for Odoo Meetings.
- More flexible workflow to send SMS and email messages as a reminder for a meeting.
In the following elements the switch from Calendly to Odoo Meetings led to disadvantages:
- Integrated combined video, audio and chat tool has an awkward setup, forcing to choose between either 50% reduction in each axis in resolution when sharing screen, or using full screen. When using full screen, another monitor is needed to access documentation sources by the side.
- Spoken word can be hard to understand; a kind of auto-mute process often removes the initial few hundred milliseconds of voice starting to speak, leading to repeated “what did you say?” questions.
- Frequent mutes on sound which could easily be solved by opening a Microsoft Teams session in parallel.
- When sharing screen the display shrinks and expands a few times per minute by a few pixels distracting attention.
- There is no way to integrate with Microsoft Teams.
- Employees tended to be booked more than they can handle since there is no feature to centrally control the maximum number of meetings per day and time between meetings.
- The integration between the Exchange 365 hosted calendar and the Odoo Calendar often failed in both synchronisation directions, leading to new users or appointments being misesd.
- More QA issues occurred when moving between major releases.
Not Yet Ready
When trying to replace Brevo and/or Crisp by Odoo’s Livechat, the customer satisfaction imploded. This satisfaction reduction occurred less when Calendly was replaced by Odoo’s Appointments. After a few months approximately 25% of the sessions started on Odoo Appointments but were transferred to Microsoft Teams within the first 10 minutes and completed there.
The productivity of these meetings decreased by approximately 10%. When multiplied by the approximately 25%, the labor costs increased but not as extreme as with Odoo’s Livechat previously (see Experiences trying to replace Brevo and/or Crisp with Odoo LiveChat).
Combined with the usability and QA issues the choice was made to move back from Odoo Appointments to Calendly for the next three years.