If you still believe you can impose on your customers the dates and times of appointments that suit you, get ready to be disappointed! In 2021, it’s the customer who chooses. And you can easily give them this satisfaction – without completely disrupting your operations, quite the contrary!
Scheduling visits, installations, deliveries, or assessments on customer premises has long been governed by the company’s in-house logic. The underlying principle was that being “the requester”, the customer had to conform to it, and he was confronted with a fait accompli by telling him that the auditing of his concession, his annual boiler maintenance or delivery of his new sofa would take place on such and such a day, in the morning, with no further details. The onus was on the customer to be available, even if that meant cancelling all the morning's appointments or, for an individual, taking half the day off, or even the whole day…
If you manage appointment schedules then you know full well that this era is over: in B2B and B2C alike, not only is it becoming complicated, not to say impossible, to impose a date on your customers, but you also need to offer increasingly narrow timeslots, or even an exact time of arrival – that is if you do not want your technicians or delivery people to find nobody in.
As a planner, it is understandable that this exasperates you: you spend your time calling customers to reschedule the appointments and, what is more, you antagonize the field teams whose routes are constantly being disrupted by all these “misses” – not to mention the cost to your company these wasted journeys represent…
Is this the situation you are in? It is time to change method!
It is no coincidence that online appointment booking platforms are catching on with self-employed doctors and dentists. If you know any doctors, all of them will tell you that they opted for this solution for at least one of the following reasons:
This is indistinguishable from what companies who visit their customers are experiencing, whether for deliveries of bulky objects, maintenance visits, performing property valuations, or energy diagnostics. And what have doctors who have migrated the management of their diary to an online appointment booking platform observed?
On these 3 points, according to a survey carried out in June 2020, more than 70% of health professionals who use these platforms say they are “satisfied” or “very satisfied”. The survey does not say what patients think about them, but we can take it that this method of booking appointments, which has long been the only possible way in France of getting a Covid-19 vaccination and for tele-consultation appointments, has become widely accepted and will become the norm in all sectors. Why? Simply because it is practical and efficient and addresses a need of today’s customer: to have a choice and the minimum of constraints.
By incorporating an appointment booking platform into your website, you give each of your customers the ability to choose from among the time slots available at a moment “t” the one that suits him best. The mere fact that it is he who chooses, based on his own constraints, is more psychologically committing for him than if the date and time had been imposed on him “from above”. The automatic mechanism for confirming and reminding him of the appointment by SMS/email and the fit with the customer’s personal diary consolidate this commitment and minimize the risk of it being forgotten.
Let us remember that to be adopted by customers, an online appointment booking platform needs to be extremely easy to access and simple to use. That means that it needs to be thought through from the user’s perspective, not according to the company’s internal logic, and be aligned with contemporary interface and navigation standards. Doctolib’s success is down to the quality of the design and user experience it affords.
Two more pieces of advice for your appointment booking platform:
What customers do not see – and what is more, do not need to know – is that the timeslots offered to them are pre-optimized according to criteria and parameters reflecting the company’s priorities. This is the great advantage of the appointment booking platform embedded in the GEOCONCEPT optimization solutions. Thanks to the dynamic link between appointment management and the optimization engine you can, for example:
GEOCONCEPT solutions enable you very quickly to set up your own online appointment booking platform and configure it as you wish so that it really serves your business and maximizes your teams’ productive time, while making life easier for your customers.
Does that give you any ideas? Let’s talk!