Everyone wants to create more profit and revenue for their business, right?
If you rely on client bookings, referrals, and appointments, you will want to ensure the number of bookings you obtain is increasing.
There are various ways to increase traffic to your business, including gaining customer retention through incentives and referral schemes, effective and creative marketing, and social media strategies; however, without a booking system that works effectively, then all this effort will be for nothing.
Thus we bring you the appointment scheduler.
This enables you to ensure excellent customer services for your clients, money and time saving, and deliver an overall more efficient service to clients.
We’re here to show you how this can elevate and advance your business by detailing what it is and why it is necessary to have amongst the other fantastic advantages.
Below we’ll talk about:
What is an online appointment schedule?
Why should a solution have certain features?
Why a small business needs an appointment booking software?
So what is it?
It is an app, which you can utilize as a tool for your business to enable clients to schedule their own appointments via an online portal.
Thus allowing your staff access to the portal allows them to manage the calendar and bookings, making it simple and effective.
Why use it?
There are many advantages to this; below are some listed.
Fewer people not turning up to their appointment
This can be a great let down not only does it count for loss of profit but also loss of time, and many businesses rely on this to keep on servicing their customers and continuing to operate.
Confirmations and reminders will automatically be sent to your clients, so they have no reason to forget; this takes the strain off you having to remember to do so. SMS reminders have been shown to be highly effective s much as a 39% decrease in no-shows was found by the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine when they conducted a study.
What’s more, you won’t have to worry about changing and re-arranging the appointments as this can be done directly by the client using the app.
- 24/7 Appointment Scheduling
We can’t be available all day every day to make appointments, and whilst some people have busier schedules than others, the app allows clients to book appointments whenever they have free time.
Many people work shifts and thus prefer to book outside the usual 9-5. In fact, 35% of clients agree, and 40% of those bookings are done outside usual business hours.
The moral of the story is people want to book when they feel it is most suitable for them, and who can blame them? We live in a fast-paced society that allows you to bring traffic in while you sleep.
- An Easier Booking Experience
We all want things to be simpler; people prefer to communicate via their phones as opposed to on the phone as that can be quite tiresome. Taking down information through notes can easily get lost, then follow up takes time, and the client can be left waiting.
This cuts out all this madness and also ensures fewer mistakes are made. Genuine human errors can occur, such as double booking or forgetting to remind clients; this can be avoided through the app.
- Simple Yet Effective Marketing
Most marketing and promoting business is done online and for a valid reason due to most people having access to the web and spending a lot of their time there.
This can work well for social media; should they click on your posts or ads, then it can be linked to your online scheduling, and rather than being diverted to a website that looks poor, it allows them to use a system that works well and is optimally designed.
For example, a spa in Chicago known as BB Artistry that specializes in skincare and eyebrows uses Instagram to promote their business; instead, of posting a link to a page that isn’t used for conversing, the company links the booking portal, so it is transforming people on the account immediately into clients and bookings.
This is a great idea if you use social media to promote your business; it skips the process of ringing, going to a website, and enables them to book straight away before they have time to think and change their mind.
- More Visibility Through Google
If you have a business that is at the forefront of Google and you wish to attract more traffic through local searches, then this will be a focus for you. Statistics show that searches for business ‘near me’ have increased by 500% throughout 2017; this shows the effectiveness and increased need for people to use google to find local businesses.
By gaining an established feature on the Google-centric world, it navigates you in front of your local clients ahead of others.
This can be achieved through having the right booking system and software. Take Genbook, for example, which works alongside Reserve with Google (RwG), which consumers search for businesses and book appointments through Maps or Google Search.
Google assists with this through advertising businesses that take part in this on its booking platform by showcasing them onto the Reserve with Google website. It even puts a ‘SCHEDULE’ button next to the company so clients can book an appointment whilst on this page, handy!
- Multi-Channel Appointment Scheduling
Many customers now tend to float from one device, such as their phone, tablet, or laptop, when they go on different websites for different reasons to look at services, shop, or browse. It is common for people to see a shop they like and use their phone to book an appointment.
Society today is evolving in relation to technology, which is used, and it’s important to stay on track with the latest gadgets and developments that will help your business grow. Therefore it is important the scheduler is available to use on various methods such as a phone, tablet, or laptop.
Less Chance of Mistakes Being Made
Mistakes are inevitable, but if you can reduce the chances, then why not?
This can easily be done when manually booking appointments such as booking a client twice, incorrect recording of details, wrong time slots selected; this can lose business and potential customers.
Details are saved automatically and thus added to your calendar straight away, reminders are sent out without prompts, and the overall client experience is improved.
- More Potential For Growth
Business growth is generally seen to increase when appointment scheduling is introduced, that being due to a few reasons.
More successful bookings because customers are more easily converted from viewers to making actual bookings as the process is much less hassle for them.
Not only that, but it encourages customer retention by sending out reminders about rebooking.
Customers, in general, tend to be happier due to the ease of the process, and less stress means more convenience.
Higher revenue means less time and money spent on you doing admin-related jobs so you can focus your energy and productivity on other areas of your business.
- Stronger Knowledge into Your Business
The app will give you an insight into what works and what doesn’t, when do people book the most, what are the busiest times and days?
Many details of the app can allow you to find out through analytics relevant data.
For instance, should you know the optimum hours you operate, you could program your staff to suit those busier periods? Similarly, if you know times in which you are quieter, you can think of ways to increase traffic in those times, perhaps through offers or special advertising.
With manual booking systems, this would be extremely difficult to extract this sort of data and would take time and effort, which leads to the final reason…
- Time Savings
Most business owners feel as though there are never enough hours to fit everything in one day, and ‘The Alternative Board’ ran a survey which revealed that 60% of small business owners wished they had more time, 39% found admin jobs were the least productive task they had to do.
If you feel the same and feel the time could be spent on more productive tasks, then being online will alleviate many of those dreaded details you need to do.
Another added bonus for not only yourself but the environment too would be a reduction in paper used; it’s a win-win for everyone!
