Scheduling an intake: who arranges the appointment after the first request?

A new client sends a request. The form comes in, or an email, or a message via the website. Then begins the work that nobody counts as work: finding an appointment that suits both parties.

For a lawyer, an adviser or an accountancy firm, that first appointment, the intake, is the moment when a request becomes a client. Yet arranging it often gets put off until there is a quiet moment. And a request that waits three days for a reply is a request that, in the meantime, is also sitting with another firm.

How it works now

The pattern is almost the same everywhere. You read the request and check your calendar. You send two or three proposals. The client replies that Thursday doesn't work but Friday does, only after lunch. You look again, adjust something, confirm. Then comes the invitation, a route or video link, and a reminder the day before asking which documents the client should bring.

Per intake, that quickly adds up to four to six emails, spread over several days. If you cautiously estimate ten minutes of work per intake, spread over those days, then with ten new requests in a month that comes to well over an hour and a half. Not much, but it falls right in between other work. A small task like this interrupts you every time, and that costs more than the ten minutes themselves. The figure above is an illustrative calculation, not a measurement: count for a week how often you are busy with this yourself.

What an agent takes over

The Planner agent and the Secretary agent take over the mechanical part. That part consists of a few fixed steps:

1. reading the request and establishing what is being asked
2. laying your available times alongside the client's wishes
3. drafting a reply with a few concrete proposals
4. after the client's answer, recording the appointment and drafting the confirmation
5. preparing a reminder with what the client should bring

What the agent does not decide: whether this request fits your firm, whether you want this client, and whether a special request (an evening appointment, a home visit) is possible. That remains up to you. The agent proposes, you decide.

Why you approve an outcome and not an intention

With many tools that automate work, you approve a setting. You switch on a rule: send a scheduling email for every request. What that email says exactly, who it goes to and which times it contains, you only see once it has already been sent. For an intake, that is no detail. A proposal for a time when you already have another appointment, or a confirmation sent to the wrong address, is visible to a future client.

At Stilops it works the other way around. You start a test run on a real request, or on an example you supply yourself. The agent shows what would happen: which times it picks from your calendar, which text it would send to the client and what the confirmation would say. At that point nothing has been sent. You read it, adjust where needed and then approve the outcome.

The difference seems small, but it determines whether you dare to use the agent for work that is visible to clients. You don't have to trust what the agent intends to do. You see what happens before it happens.

What you need for it

A test run is only as good as the information it works with. For scheduling intakes that is not much, but it has to be correct:

1. on which parts of the day you hold intakes and how long they last
2. whether they are on location, by phone or by video
3. what a client has to provide beforehand
4. in what tone you write to new clients

A guide in the catalogue for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 explains how to connect your calendar and email. These are introductory guides with a separate registration with the provider, not a connection that works by itself. So allow for a short one-time setup beforehand.

When this pays off

It doesn't pay off for everyone. If you have two intakes a month, it makes little difference. With ten or more new requests per month, or at a firm where several people hold intakes and appointments get in each other's way, the gain is greater. Then it saves not only hours, but also the days that a request now sits unanswered.

An honest way to establish that: for a month, write down how many requests come in, how many emails the scheduling cost and how long it took before the client received a first reply. With those three numbers you know for yourself whether the work is worth handing off.

The first step

Take the last request you received and run a test run on it. In a few minutes you will see what the agent makes of it. If it fits, you approve it. If it doesn't, nothing has been sent and you have only seen what needs to be better.