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Ideas, tips and techniques for new generation selling and customer support.
Category Archives: appointment scheduling
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
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.
2009
TimeDriver: “Better Service, Better Price – Brilliant!”
We don’t often use this space to crow, but this time we gotta: here’s a great piece by “Marketing Materials Maven” Karin Witzig. For two years she’s used a competing product, and yesterday she updated her blog post because she’s switched to TimeDriver.
She starts out talking about her previous experience, then tells how happy she is with TimeDriver.
New Online Scheduling Software – Beats All the Rest
2009
We’re “Hot Tool of the Month” at Smart Selling Tools!
How cool is this? Last month at Dreamforce, the massive global conference for Salesforce.com, our TimeDriver personal appointment scheduler was seen by legions of show-goers. Among them was the legendary Nancy Nardin of Smart Selling Tools. And boy did she like TimeDriver: she’s named it Hot Tool of the Month for December!
You can go to the award page and vote us up. (TimeDriver users, leave a comment!)
Why did she pick TimeDriver? In her Dreamforce report she says…
Continue reading »
2009
City of Boston Improving Customer Care? There’s an app for that!
Government agencies are rarely considered synonymous with good customer service, but that’s changing. From appointment scheduling for DMVs (see our New Jersey case study) to counties and municipalities becoming more customer-oriented (the Cleveland area’s Cuyahoga County (case study) schedules 78,000 appointments a year with us), the way government agencies interact with citizens is changing.
One recent example is the City of Boston. In a leap towards efficiency, citizen empowerment, and harnessing technology for better customer service, Boston has launched an iPhone application for municipal complaints.
Continue reading »
2009
Enhancing Customer Experience with Online Scheduling
Sometimes it seems customer care improvement is at odds with streamlining operations. Financial Services Technology made the point beautifully with a script for an imaginary TV commercial about a surgeon who calls a helpline and gets put on hold: one humorous example of how some technologies make businesses choose between customer care and efficiency. Voice mail is another example of this; how many customers like reaching a voice mail tree?
But there are other technologies that deliver both improved customer care and operational efficiencies. Appointment scheduling software is one great example. Hard ROI numbers aside (and there are plenty of them), appointment scheduling software gives businesses the flexibility to work with customers when most convenient for the customer.
Continue reading »
Filed under: appointment scheduling, appointment scheduling software, customer service
Tagged: appointment scheduler improve customer service, appointment scheduling, appointment scheduling software, customer care, customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer service, efficiency, improve customer service, interactive features, online scheduling
2009
Appointment Scheduling Software + Personal Courtesy = Customer Satisfaction
Appointment scheduling software helps maintain customer loyalty through automation, so employees can focus on the personal courtesy side of good service.
An appointment is a reservation for service, both the service performed by the business and the personal attention received from employees. A satisfied customer needs to feel both aspects of customer care are handled well.
A Beagle Research White Paper, Improving Service Businesses with Appointment Scheduling, illustrates this. The CRM analyst firm found that “significant numbers of people believe that appointments should start exactly when or very near when they are scheduled — with virtually no waiting at all.”
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2009
Five Growing Markets For Appointment Scheduling Software
I like having an appointment, and I hate waiting. Both my doctor’s office and day spa get this and thus have appointment scheduling software to serve and satisfy customers like me.
However, such software is also being used in other markets on an increasing scale. Here’s a look at five vertical markets that are rapidly adopting appointment scheduling, and why appointment scheduling software makes sense for them:
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2009
Help!!! Our Customer Care Needs a Makeover
If you’re in a service industry such as a salon or spa that is heavily dependent on customer appointments, it may be time to seriously consider investing in appointment software that can provide customer reminders as part of customer care improvement.
The recent recession has hit the beauty industry hard, although recent signs indicate that the industry as a whole is improving: the Professional Beauty Association said in August that its new Salon/Spa Performance Index rose in the latest quarter. While things may be looking up, customers are more scrutinizing than ever and stretched thinner for time as they try to juggle all the demands in their lives.
Appointment reminders help customers be prompt, which contributes to their satisfaction with services as well as providing a calmer and more organized environment for everyone. In addition, it can help reduce the amount of cancellations and no-shows. A business that reaches out to help customers where they are shows them that you care about more than profits.
David Hill
TimeTrade Blogging Team
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakecaptive/ / CC BY 2.0
2009
The Risks of A Paper-Based Appointment Scheduler
For all its nostalgia, a paper-based appointment scheduler can also give an unprofessional appearance, and it carries risks:
- It can jeopardize customer privacy
- It may cause confusion if penmanship is obscure
- There is a chance, as some unfortunate people have learned, that it will be
- lost
- stolen
- used to scope out the business for a crime.
For some businesses, an appointment scheduler is vital to properly serve their customers, but a paper-based appointment book may involve too much risk to continue being used.
David Hill
TimeTrade Blogging Team
Image Credit: InMagine PDEP006052
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