How to Share Your Availability Without Making Customers Do the Math

Sending “I’m free Thursday at 2pm” makes the customer do work before the conversation has even started. They have to figure out what time zone you mean, convert it, and hope they got it right. Most of the time they manage. Sometimes they show up an hour off.

The simplest fix: send a booking link. Tools like Calendly, Cal.com, or a scheduling link from your calendar app show your availability in the customer’s local time automatically. They pick a slot, it lands on both calendars, and nobody did any arithmetic. For high-volume customer-facing teams, this is the highest-leverage change you can make.

When a booking link isn’t appropriate — say, you’re scheduling with a senior contact where that format feels too transactional — offer times by email but anchor them in UTC:

I have openings on:

• Thursday 15 June at 14:00 UTC (10am EDT / 3pm BST)
• Friday 16 June at 16:00 UTC (12pm EDT / 5pm BST)

UTC is the reference that works for anyone, anywhere. The local equivalents are a courtesy.

A few things that are easy to forget:

• Write the full date, not just the day. “Thursday” means different things depending on when the customer reads the message.
• Confirm the calendar invite actually shows the right time in the customer’s zone. A correctly configured invite handles this automatically, but it’s worth double-checking before an important call.