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No Lines, No Waiting
Bringing service to the fore while conserving your cash
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
2010
New: Increase Sales Productivity with TimeDriver for Salesforce
Now Available on the Salesforce.com AppExchange
We’ve often talked about TimeDriver, our personal appointment scheduler, which was recently named Hot Selling Tool of the Month by sales guru Nancy Nardin. Great news: TimeDriver is now available on the AppExchange, for use in the Salesforce CRM system.
TimeDriver improves sales productivity: it helps you get more confirmed appointments – and saves you the time-consuming hassle of appointment ping pong too. More appointments mean more sales and more sales mean more money.
How do we know TimeDriver produces more confirmed appointments? We did a controlled “A/B test” comparing an email with a TimeDriver schedule button to an email that asks people to propose a few times when they are available for a call and found that the TimeDriver button delivered 56% more confirmed meetings!
It gets even better. Now, if you’re using Salesforce as part of your arsenal of sales productivity tools you can easily connect it with TimeDriver. Get started by downloading your free TimeDriver for Salesforce tool from AppExchange. It’s an enhancement to TimeDriver that enables your sales team and others to easily invite customers and prospects to schedule time for sales demos, account reviews, and other interactions.
Appointments flow into your Salesforce, Google, or Outlook calendar. And, all TimeDriver appointments are automatically logged in Salesforce as events, associated with the invited leads and contacts. Possible uses include:
- Sales professionals can drive more appointments, generate more revenue and advance customers in the sales process more quickly
- Technical support and customer service can settle on client appointment times with none of the usual back-and-forth negotiation.
- Everyone (including customers) saves time and eliminates frustration because there’s never any phone tag or email tag to set an appointment. Invite. Click. Done.
As always, we’d love to hear what you think. So leave us a comment or send us a Tweet (@TimeDriver).
As we said, Nancy Nardin of Smart Selling Tools thinks TimeDriver is so hot, she named it hot tool of the month! And, in her new sales productivity ebook she called it “extremely easy to use and addicting.”
Addicting: how’s that for praise?? See for yourself – take TimeDriver for Salesforce for a test drive.
2010
On-Line Appointment Market Looks to Grow, TimeTrade Gets Set To Grow With It
The on-line appointment scheduling market is beginning to take off, says TimeTrade Systems CEO Ed Mallen in a story recently published in MassHighTech.com.
“The switch will be like banks going to ATMs,” Mallen says. “It’s a very natural play to begin to have consumers be able to make their appointments over the web and be satisfied that when they get there the resource is going to be ready, willing and able.”
TimeTrade, a market maker in on-line appointment scheduling since its founding in 1999, has its sights set on that $5-$8 billion market opportunity, according to Mallen.
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Filed under: appointment scheduling software
Tagged: appointment scheduling software, saas
2010
“Remarkable success in quality and satisfaction”:
Kaiser-Permanente’s approach to patient-centric care
What if healthcare’s inherent problems turned out not to be inherent at all?
Last month we introduced our new podcast series, Reinventing Healthcare with Technology. In our first episode we heard from innovative Brooklyn doctor Jay Parkinson, MD about the need to Reform a System That’s Badly Broken.
Today we travel to the other coast to learn what Kaiser Permanente has found, after ten years of working on some of the things Dr. Parkinson envisions. And what they’ve found, as series host Paul Gillin says in the introduction, is “remarkable successes in quality of care and member satisfaction”:
- KP’s Kate Christensen MD reports that 3.2 million members are registered users of Kaiser’s online system, making appointments online, emailing their doctors, viewing lab results and researching their condition.
- Her project partner Judy Derman cites patient quotes like “I feel more in control of my medical condition” and “I feel more confident, and closer to my physician.”
Dr. Christensen and Ms. Derman have years of data to establish that good healthcare can come with good customer service, and technology can help. Join us in listening to their real-world experience.
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Podcast: Play in new window
Filed under: Podcasts, healthcare
Tagged: healthcare, kaiser permanente, podcast
2010
How Amazon Uses Technology To Redefine The Customer Experience
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In the 1992 Presidential campaign, James Carville famously hung a sign in then Governor Clinton’s campaign office saying “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” Today’s companies probably need a similar sign with the word ‘customer’ in the place of the word ‘economy’.
2010
Fight Back Against Online Merchants: Offer Online Customer Service in a 24/7 World
In a 24/7 world, how can brick-and-mortar businesses compete with “always open” online merchants? By offering everything they can do online.
- A national portrait studio chain offers online appointment scheduling. Result: more than 20% of their business comes in while they’re closed. (That’s a 25% increase. What would you do to boost business 25%??)
- Sprint uses TimeTrade to let you self-schedule advanced support for your smartphone, 24/7. Imagine: no more queues – no lines, no waiting!
- Sonora Quest lets patients schedule quick appointments for blood tests etc. Result: 22,000 people a month self-schedule. They all get seen within five minutes – and think how much staff time would be needed to schedule those appointments manually.
Filed under: appointment scheduling software, customer service
Tagged: 24/7 business, always on business, appointment scheduler improve customer service, appointment scheduling, appointment scheduling software, customer care, customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer service options, efficiency, improve customer service, online scheduling, retail
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