Why intake belongs in the booking
A hairdresser books a person and a time. A practice books a matter: what the client needs, when it has to happen, whether there is a conflict, which fee earner should take it, and whether the meeting is a fifteen-minute call or a paid hour. A bare calendar link gets you a stranger in a slot and a meeting that starts with "so, tell me why you're here".
The setup below puts a booking tool behind the button and the intake in front of it, without asking a nervous client to fill in a fact find before they have met you.
Step 1: choose the tool for your kind of practice
- Simple diary, one or two fee earners: Calendly. Event types per meeting kind, buffers, automatic Zoom, Teams or Google Meet links, payment on paid consultations.
- Several people, conditional intake, locations or deposits: Acuity Scheduling. More configuration, more control.
- Already on Microsoft 365: Microsoft Bookings. Staff availability from Outlook, meetings as Teams calls, data inside the tenant your IT policy covers.
- Law firm treating intake as a process: Clio Grow or Lawmatics. The booking becomes a prospective client record with intake forms, engagement letters and follow-up.
- Accountancy firm with workflow in one place: Karbon, usually alongside a scheduler for the call itself.
- Adviser with a back office: Intelliflo, or whatever your practice already runs.
- Specialist: Docketwise for immigration consultants, TaxDome or Canopy for tax preparers, Smartr365 for mortgage brokers, Reapit, Alto or Street.co.uk for estate agent valuations.
Features move; confirm the current specification with the vendor. Already on something that works? Keep it.
Step 2: define the meeting types before touching the site
Usually two, occasionally three.
- Introductory call. Fifteen or twenty minutes, free, phone or video. Purpose: work out whether you can help and whether they want you to.
- Full consultation. Forty-five to ninety minutes, in person or video, paid or not according to your practice, with the fee stated on the page and taken at booking if you charge it.
- Service-specific meeting where the work needs it: a valuation appointment, a document appointment by type, an interpreting assignment request.
Name them on the website exactly as they are named in the tool. Mismatched names are where clients book the wrong thing.
Step 3: configure the tool
- Availability from the real calendar, with buffers and a minimum notice period.
- Round-robin or per-person links, so a client can book a named fee earner.
- Location choices: office, phone, video, with the link generated automatically.
- Payment on paid consultations, with the refund and cancellation window stated.
- Reminders at twenty-four hours and, for paid meetings, one hour.
- Notifications to the right inbox, and to a phone for same-day bookings.
Step 4: keep the intake short and safe
Three to six fields on the booking form: name, contact, one line on what it is about, when it needs to happen, how they found you, and any consent your privacy policy requires. Add a service or matter-type dropdown so the enquiry routes correctly and a conflict check can be started.
What does not go on a scheduling form: financial details, health information, immigration status, case narrative, documents. Those go into a secure portal or an encrypted upload after the meeting is booked, or come to the meeting itself. Check the tool's data handling against your own policy and your regulator's expectations before you publish it. This is orientation rather than advice; your compliance lead decides.
Where more detail genuinely helps, send it as a second, optional form with the confirmation, and say plainly that it is optional and speeds the first meeting up.
Step 5: put the button where the client already is
A Book button in the header on every page, and a slim fixed bar on phones carrying Book and the phone number. On each service page, a button that opens the right meeting type for that service. On each team profile, a button that books that person. For law firms and business consultants the profile button matters most, because the client has usually chosen the individual by then.
Use the tool's hosted page or per-type links from service pages, and reserve the full embed for a single Book a consultation page, so the rest of the site stays fast.
Step 6: the Book page does the reassuring
One page carrying the embed, a short line on what each meeting type is for, what happens on the call, whether it costs anything, how long the intake takes, what to have to hand, and the phone number for anyone who would rather ring. Reserve the embed's height so the page does not jump as it loads.
Step 7: write the confirmation and reminder
What the meeting covers, who they are meeting, how long, where or which link, what to bring, the cancellation window, and a link to the relevant service page. This single email removes most of the calls that follow a booking.
Step 8: test and track
Book a test client from your own phone, in Safari and Chrome, and check the confirmation, the calendar entry, the video link and the reminder. Then add a booking event on every tap, recording the page and meeting type, and read the tool's own report monthly beside it.
Where this sits
Consultation booking with intake, one tap from every page, matched to the service names and the people who do the work, is the core of every professional services website we build, and the scope is on pricing. The tool holds the diary and the record. The website's job is to get a prepared client into it on the evening they went looking.