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No Lines, No Waiting
Bringing service to the fore while conserving your cash
2010
Confessions of a Chronic No-Show
It’s hard to admit publicly, but sometimes I fall victim to “missed appointment” syndrome. Despite knowing that it costs my service providers money, and is incredibly disrespectful to them, it happens.
I’m not alone. Some studies show an average of 25% of appointments at medical clinics are no-shows.
It seems like for every missed appointment, there’s a different excuse. Here are some of mine:
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Filed under: appointment reminder
Tagged: appointment scheduling, interactive features, reminders
2010
Reflections on our podcast series “Reinventing Healthcare with Technology” as reform languishes in Washington
When we started our podcast series in December, the healthcare debates in Washington were a hot and tangled mess. With Scott Brown’s election to the Senate last month, the mess got worse. It seems clear that politics are unlikely to dramatically improve anything, at least not soon.
But people are still getting sick, and that means they need care. Is it hopeless? No.
Regardless of politics, many good people are doing many good things to improve care. And we’re proud of how, in hindsight, our podcasts spotlight true reformers who have real-world results.
- “Doctor of the Future” Jay Parkinson MD shared his vision in “Reforming a system that’s badly broken”
- With ten years of experience, Kaiser-Permanente’s Kate Christensen and Judy Derman describe their “Remarkable success in quality and satisfaction” with patient-centered Web technology
- Berkeley HeartLab’s Matt Sitter described how they’ve achieved “Strong and lasting relationships with our patients” using TimeTrade to coordinate appointments and resources.
In the final episode, after Matt speaks, I offer some closing perspectives on the future of healthcare, most of all this:
“There are tremendous opportunities to modernize healthcare simply by adopting best practices that are well established in other industries.”
We fervently hope that as we all work to improve healthcare, we include good business practices as well as medical magic. TimeTrade can help.
Click to learn more about TimeTrade’s medical appointment scheduling software.
2010
“Textaurant” Improves the Waiting Experience
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Everyone loves the Cheesecake Factory. The problem is everyone loves the Cheesecake Factory: customers can wait up to two hours for a table. A packed bar, lobby and waiting area might be good news for the restaurateur, but it’s certainly bad news for the customers. Who likes to stand around waiting?
2010
Turn These Business Resolutions Into Reality
New Year’s Resolutions we’ve collected for doing business in 2010:For the past two years businesses have dug in, deepened the trenches, reduced staff and cut costs to the bone. Now, in 2010, economic progress reports suggest the time is coming to start building and growing again.
But you don’t need to hire new employees or add a lot of costly equipment to turn these resolutions into realities. Every one of them has been attained by real companies using web-based appointment scheduling software. Read their stories in our case study library, and then make some resolutions for your own business in 2010.
Rich Silverman
TimeTrade Blogging Team
Public domain Image by Ivan Akira courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Filed under: appointment scheduling software, customer retention, customer service
Tagged: appointment scheduler improve customer service, appointment scheduling, appointment scheduling software, customer care, customer experience, customer retention, customer satisfaction, downturn, improve customer service, improving customer care, more with less
2010
Tipping Point: How Long Will Customers Wait?
Three separate studies into the psychology and behavior of people waiting in lines, on the phone and on the web all agree – people are impatient and don’t want to wait.
Paco Underhill, consultant and author of the book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, notes that 90 seconds is the limit to how long a customer accurately perceives the duration of his wait in a line. After 90 seconds, perception goes off track, and two minutes seems like three and three minutes seems like five.
At a certain point, Underhill says, waiting will be seen as a separate activity rather than part of a process, such as making an appointment. Underhill notes simply: 90 seconds or fewer = success. More than 90 seconds = not success.
People online have an even shorter attention span – about 4 seconds. Picture a potential customer waiting for a page to load on a website. After four seconds, according to research conducted by web consultants Akamai and Jupiter Research, customers start to leave a slow website. The only things consumers like less than waiting are high product prices and expensive shipping.
According to a post in callcentermanagement.com, call center operators shouldn’t concern themselves with how long people will wait before they hang up the phone when trying, for example, to make an appointment. It is far more important, according to the site, to track and manage first call resolution – the percentage of callers taken care of with just one call.
What lesson can we draw from all this? The key to customer satisfaction – whether on the phone, on line, or in line, is to take care of them fast and get it right the first time.
Rich Silverman
TimeTrade Blogging Team
Image Credit: InMagine TEMP2341
2010
What’s Wrong with Manual Appointment Scheduling?
Appointment scheduling the old-fashioned way can easily turn into a hassle for both the customer and the service provider.
Customers want convenience: a quick process to book an appointment that matches their schedule.
Service providers want bookings, as many as possible. But the busier you get, the harder it is to take time to take calls.
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Filed under: appointment scheduling software, customer service
Tagged: appointment scheduler improve customer service, appointment scheduling, appointment scheduling software, customer experience, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, customer service, improve customer service, improving customer care, online scheduling
2010
Personal Service Providers: Make Life Easier On Yourself – Let Customers Schedule Themselves
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Hair Salons and Day Spas – regardless of size – need appointment scheduling software. The “needs” test is not based on the size of the business, but the volume of business. Busy salons and spas can enhance customer service while also increasing efficiency.
Filed under: appointment reminder, appointment scheduling software, customer retention
Tagged: appointment scheduler improve customer service, appointment scheduling, appointment scheduling software, customer care, customer experience, customer loyalty, customer retention, customer satisfaction, customer service, improve customer service, improving customer care, manual appointment scheduling, online scheduling, reminders, self service
2010
Appointment Scheduling Software Reduces Errors
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There will always be people who want to schedule appointments by talking to a live person. They can ask questions, tell the scheduler a cute story about why they are making an appointment or just have a nice conversation with a fellow human being. But a large and growing group of people want the 24/7 convenience offered by online scheduling software. Both types can be satisfied with online appointment scheduling.
2010
“Strong and lasting relationships with our patients”: Berkeley HeartLab optimizes both care and costs
So many aspects of healthcare are arcane, complex, almost magical. Many of us have a healthcare miracle story to tell. I have my own from when I battled cancer three years ago. These are the feel-good medicine and medical stories that get passed along when friends, family and colleagues become ill.
But for every magical or miraculous story, there is another—especially in the area of customer care—that shows healthcare is too often behind the times. Customers spend more time in healthcare waiting rooms than any other industry, and despite constant cost pressures, staff time is too often used inefficiently.
Technology can help. In this, the third podcast in our series Reinventing Healthcare with Technology, we hear from a 
TimeTrade customer about how they’ve improved operations terrifically, producing both better efficiency and better customer outcomes – while saving $125,000 a year, far more than the system costs them. How smart is that?
Matt Sitter is Director of Marketing for the Disease Management Program at Berkeley HeartLab (BHLInc.com). Listen as he shares his first-hand success at transforming the business of care: “It’s incredibly gratifying to see the success that a number of our patients have with the 4MyHeart program.”
Podcast: Play in new window
Filed under: Podcasts, healthcare, scheduling software
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