Find the best Meeting Room Booking Software

Meeting Room Software Buyers Guide

We might disagree on whether office meetings actually improve our productivity. But we all will agree that productivity declines when meeting room bookings are mismanaged. 

After all, it’s never pleasant to find another team in the meeting room when you get there. And it’s not just a cause of embarrassment for team managers but an unnecessary waste of everyone’s time as the team scrambles to find another room.

Unfortunately, this can be a recurring scenario if there is no centralized system to manage meeting room reservations. 

This buyers guide will help businesses understand the benefits of using a meeting room booking software system, how the tool works, its features, and the important considerations to have in mind while purchasing one.

Here’s what we’ll cover

• What is meeting room booking software?
• Common features of meeting room booking software
• What type of buyer are you?
• Benefits of meeting room booking software
• Key considerations when selecting meeting room booking software
• Market trends

What is meeting room booking software?

Meeting room booking software is a tool that allows users to schedule meeting events and accordingly reserve rooms using built-in calendars. It also allows users to set parameters such as the duration and recurrence of a meeting.

An important functionality of meeting room booking software is the option to check the availability of meeting rooms, which prevents double bookings.

The software typically integrates with various internal communications tools, making it easy for users to share meeting details with team members.

Booking a meeting room in Skedda (Source)

Common features of meeting room booking software

The right meeting room booking software features depend on the scale and size of your business. However, there are some common features that most meeting room software offer.

Feature	Description
Meeting room bookings	Book meeting venue by checking the availability of rooms on a dashboard that supports a built-in calendar.
Meeting details editor	Customize the details of a meeting, such as location, duration, and recurrence, and provide notes such as meeting themes or agenda.
Meeting invites	Send meeting invitations to team members and receive notifications when they accept the invite.
Plug-ins	Access the meeting room software on different internal communications applications via plug-ins.
Room utilization report	View reports on built-in dashboards to get insights such as which meetings rooms are most frequently used and the ratio of meeting room bookings by different teams.

What type of buyer are you?

To make the best choice when selecting meeting room booking software, you need to understand the buyer category you fall into. Here are the two most common buyer groups for this software.

• Small and midsize businesses: This group comprises businesses with up to 999 employees. These buyers are primarily concerned about the cost of a software system. What they want is a low-maintenance, easy-to-use tool that doesn’t take a long time to set up or learn and is available for a low monthly subscription fee.
• Enterprises: These buyers have offices in multiple locations and a large workforce (1,000+ employees) that needs to book meeting rooms frequently. This makes effective communication between teams and individuals an important aspect and thus, integration capabilities with third-party internal communications systems is a sought-after functionality for these buyers.

Benefit of meeting room booking software

While some of the benefits of meeting room booking software may be clear from our discussion above, we've listed the most notable one in this section.

• Save the productive time of employees: Meeting room software saves employee time in multiple ways. Firstly, employees can significantly speed up the process of booking rooms by accessing a centralized database of rooms and sending automated invites.
  
  Secondly, the tool eliminates double-booking errors, ensuring that employees don’t waste time wandering in search of unoccupied space.

Key considerations when selecting meeting room booking software

Before investing in a meeting room booking system, you need to look at some additional considerations.

• Mobile apps: Empowered by mobile technology, the workforce today prefers mobility in all aspects, including making reservations for meetings on the go. This makes it important that the software offers mobile capabilities such as iOS and Android apps for tablets and smartphones.
• Support costs: While most meeting room software vendors offer free technical support for a host of issues, there can be extra charges for premium services such as priority phone support. To ensure you’re not caught by any surprise, enquire with the vendor about all the different support options and their relevant charges.

Market trends

Here are some recent trends for meeting room booking software that you should be aware of:

• Visitor management module: While internal meetings are common, frequent, and important to smooth functioning, external meetings, such as those with business partners and investors, can’t be overlooked.
  
  

  As a result, there is a rising demand for visitor management capabilities such as visitor databases, automated registrations, check-ins, and notifications when visitors arrive for the meeting.

• Integration with digital signage solutions: This technology is becoming popular as an add-on to meeting room booking software. By integrating these two, you can display accurate and updated information about meeting schedules on digital signs placed outside meeting rooms.

Note: The application selected in this article is an example to show a feature in context and isn’t intended as an endorsement or a recommendation. It has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.