Small businesses spend a lot of time scheduling meetings, which creates problems of its own.
Partnering with Zoho Bookings beltThe world’s largest global research marketplace inspection In March 2025, we asked how teams across departments and industries schedule meetings internally and with customers. Of the more than 1,700 respondents, 254 were from U.S.-based small businesses with fewer than 250 employees.
The results revealed surprising inefficiencies that are still widespread among small and medium-sized businesses. Despite acknowledging that AI can be a useful scheduling tool and expressing comfort with technology that performs this task, the majority of SMB respondents avoided dedicated scheduling software altogether, preferring less efficient and error-prone traditional methods.
Small businesses should take this survey data as a wake-up call about the value of technology, especially for mission-critical tasks like scheduling. Here are more details on the survey results:
manual labor
Despite technological advancements over the past few years, small and medium-sized businesses are sticking with tried-and-true methods of scheduling meetings, even though these methods have proven to be highly inefficient. According to the survey, 72.8% of SMB respondents primarily use email to schedule meetings and appointments, while 57.1% use phone calls.
The process begins with availability collection. This is another task that is not yet optimized for most small businesses surveyed. Zoho and Cint found that 51.6% of small businesses use email and messaging apps to check meeting availability. 48% use a shared calendar dashboard, but 43.3% still check their colleagues’ time manually.
This trend feels more appropriate for early-stage, smaller businesses before too many employees are involved. However, as your business grows, it would be wise to move away from these time-consuming methods. This is especially true for small and medium-sized businesses. Resources are very limited and profit margins are very thin. The less time your employees spend navigating cumbersome systems, searching email threads, or tracking responses, the better.
time to waste
The survey further emphasized that scheduling meetings takes everyone’s time. The data shows that while 46.5% of respondents were able to schedule a meeting within an hour, the majority were not. 28.4% said it took 1 to 6 hours, 13.8% said it took 6 to 12 hours, and 8.3% said it took up to 24 hours.
Scheduling issues are only half the battle. Nearly half of respondents (46.1%) said that going back and forth between schedules was the biggest time waster. Once a meeting is scheduled, 34.7% say no-shows are a serious problem, 31.9% say double bookings are their biggest problem, and 23.6% say they have to deal with uneven team schedules.
In small businesses, meetings don’t just happen once a week. The majority of manual schedulers (68.7%) said they maintain between 1 and 5 appointments per day, with other respondents claiming more. Additionally, as companies increase in size and complexity, the average number of meetings per day is likely to increase.
The benefits rarely outweigh the fears.
A third (34.7%) of small and medium-sized businesses surveyed use dedicated scheduling software, and these companies claim they have reaped many benefits. The top five were calendar automation, meeting management, employee productivity, team scheduling and coordination, and customer experience. All of this not only saves time, but at its core, it also contributes to growing your small business.
This doesn’t mean that every small business that uses scheduling software will be satisfied. Of those, only 18.2% said their tools met their needs. Of those who couldn’t make the same claim, 40.9% wanted more AI features added, 39.8% wanted more integrations, and 37.5% wanted better customer support.
Although available software options may not meet everything small businesses want to achieve, the demand still exists. According to the survey, 59% of small and medium-sized businesses believed that AI would significantly help them schedule meetings, while 28.4% were neutral on the concept, having never seen AI in action. Additionally, more than half (about 53%) of SMB respondents felt comfortable with AI managing their schedules. However, 51.2% of SMBs are concerned that their companies will lose the human touch due to AI timelines, and 41.3% are concerned that they will lose control over decision-making.
schedule success
When small and medium-sized businesses book software, the barrier to AI adoption isn’t technical skepticism. The fear is that automation will make small businesses feel less like companies, losing the personalization and camaraderie they value.
As AI technology advances and is integrated into all kinds of software, the fear of losing autonomy will diminish. Vendors are increasing the amount of context their AI agents receive, allowing them to make decisions based on the reality of employees and within the guardrails set by managers. A centralized dashboard increases visibility and allows changes to be made so the system can iterate on best practices.
The survey shows that small businesses cannot be left to their own devices. They believe that scheduling software can save time and maximize the efficiency of meetings. But many have yet to take the leap and instead rely on old-fashioned methods like emails, spreadsheets, and endless phone tags. The growth of a small business relies heavily on teamwork, and there is no better way to collaborate than getting everyone together in the same space, virtual or not. AI-powered conferencing software makes this happen.
Image via Envato
This article says «Key scheduling trends demonstrate a reluctance to embrace efficiency. Now is the time for change.«was first published. Small and Medium Business Trends
