Top Scheduling Trends Reveal Reluctance to Embrace Efficiency—and it’s Time for a Change

Small businesses are losing a lot of time scheduling meetings, and the problem is of their own making.

Zoho Bookings partnered with Cint, the world’s largest global research marketplace, to launch a survey in March of 2025 asking how teams across departments and industries schedule meetings, both internally and with clients. Of the more than 1,700 respondents, 254 were from US-based small businesses, defined as having less than 250 employees.

The results exposed a surprising amount of inefficiency still prevalent among small businesses. Despite acknowledging that AI can be a helpful scheduling tool and expressing comfort in the technology taking over this task, the vast majority of SMB respondents evaded dedicated scheduling software altogether, instead favoring old methods that are less efficient and more prone to error.

Small businesses should take this survey data as a wake-up call to the value of technology, particularly for mission critical tasks like scheduling. Here’s more on what the survey found:

Manual labor

Despite advances in technology over the last few years, small businesses are sticking to tried-and-true methods for scheduling meetings, even if those ways have proven highly inefficient. According to the survey, 72.8% of SMB respondents primarily use email to schedule meetings and appointments, and 57.1% use phone calls.

The process starts with gathering availability—another task that has yet to be optimized by the majority of small businesses surveyed. Zoho and Cint discovered that 51.6% of small businesses use email and messaging apps to check availability for meetings. And though 48% use a shared calendar dashboard, 43.3% still check colleague’s time manually.

These trends feel more appropriate for a small business in its most nascent stage, before too many employees join the fray. But as companies grow, they would be wise to shift away from these time-consuming methods, which proves especially true for small businesses. Resources are severely limited and profit margins are razor-thin. The less time employees spend navigating cumbersome systems, searching through email threads, or tracking down responses, the better.

Time to waste

The survey further highlighted the toll that meeting scheduling takes on everyone’s time. According to its data, 46.5% of respondents were able to schedule meetings in less than one hour, but the majority were not, with 28.4% saying it took between 1-6 hours, 13.8% claiming to take 6-12 hours, and 8.3% taking up to 24 hours to get something on the books.

Problems with scheduling are only half the battle. Almost half of respondents, 46.1%, claimed that back-and-forth scheduling hassles constitute the single biggest drain on their time. Once meetings are booked, 34.7% said no-shows were a significant problem, 31.9% viewed double bookings as a top challenge, and 23.6% had to deal with uneven team schedules.

It’s not like meetings are only a once-a-week occurrence for small businesses. The vast majority of manual schedulers, 68.7%, said they maintain 1-5 appointments a day, with other respondents claiming more. Plus, as companies grow in size and complexity, it’s likely more meetings will need to occur throughout an average day.

Benefits barely outweigh fears

A third of small businesses surveyed, 34.7%, said they employ dedicated scheduling software, and these companies claim to have seen numerous benefits. The top five were scheduling automation, meeting management, employee productivity, team scheduling and coordination, and customer experience. All of these contribute not only to saving time but to growing a small business at its core.

That’s not to say all small businesses that use scheduling software are content. Only 18.2% of those said their tool was meeting their needs. Of those who were unable to make the same claim, 40.9% want more AI capabilities added, 39.8% want more integrations, and 37.5% want better customer support.

Available software options don’t capture all that small businesses would hope to achieve, but the demand still exists. The survey found that 59% of small businesses believed AI would be quite helpful for scheduling meetings, and 28.4% were neutral on the concept, perhaps not having seen it in action. Additionally, more than half of SMB respondents, around 53%, were comfortable with AI taking the scheduling reins, even if 51.2% of SMBs feared that AI scheduling would cause their companies to lose a human touch and 41.3% worried they’d lose control over decision-making.

Scheduling success

The barrier to AI adoption in scheduling software among SMBs isn’t technical skepticism; it’s a fear that automation will make a small business feel less like one—losing the personalization and camaraderie they’ve grown to value.

As AI technology develops and folds into software of all stripes, the fear of lost autonomy should subside. Vendors are increasing the amount of context their AI agents receive, ensuring decisions are rooted in an employee’s reality within guardrails set by managers. Centralized dashboards unlock added visibility, allowing for changes to be made so the system can iterate on best practices.

The survey demonstrates that small businesses can’t let themselves get in their own way. They believe scheduling software can save time and ensure meetings are as effective as they can be, but many have yet to take the leap, instead relying on outdated methods like email, spreadsheets, and endless phone tag. Small business growth relies heavily on teamwork, and there’s no better way to collaborate than having everyone in the same room, virtually or otherwise. AI-powered meeting software makes that happen.

Image via Envato

This article, "Top Scheduling Trends Reveal Reluctance to Embrace Efficiency—and it’s Time for a Change" was first published on Small Business Trends

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