No Lines, No Waiting
Bringing service to the fore while conserving your cash
Category Archives: scheduling software
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
How Online Software Saves Big Money
The challenge: Identifying the proper tools to reduce costs without sacrificing critical customer care.
One company reporting success in this effort is Bosley, the Beverly Hills-based men’s hair restoration subsidiary of the $850 million Aderans Holding Co.. A Computerworld article reports that Bosley’s IT Director, Mark Davenport says the company’s previous Siebel system had “gaping holes” that created double bookings, angering customers and forcing the company to revert to a semi-manual process. When Bosley adopted the SaaS tool, TimeTrade, Bosley’s consultants and medical personnel could input their available times at all 19 surgical offices. Customers were able to view available slots and set appointments convenient to their schedules — and no overlap occurred. Bosley chose a logical cost reduction tool — something effective, inexpensive, and simple.
Other ways online software saves money:
• Increases operational efficiencies
• Slims down staff overhead
• Reduces staff training expenses
• Offers quick implementation & fast application
• Frees you up from capital spent on computer & office equipment
Before you consider cutting back on necessary enterprise building tools like advertising and good customer service, consider eliminating items that are not required for you to stay in business. The idea is to cut any unnecessary expenses, not sacrifice efficiency or professionalism. Using a proven SaaS tool can help.
Pamela Taylor & Lisa Letchworth
TimeTrade Blogging Team
Image Credit: InMagine EV204040
2009
Running a Virtual Business with a Client Base? Don’t Forget Online Scheduling Software
In many cases, operating a virtual business means you’re the sole manager of client appointments. This can be a nightmare if you’re not taking advantage of a simple, affordable tool: online scheduling software.
Many small business owners manage their client base using tools and methods that don’t scale, such as scheduling by phone or appointment books. These are costly in time and convenience, and they limit on how much a virtual business can juggle at once. Online scheduling software solves it.
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2009
Appointment Software Can Help Small Businesses Make It Through the Downturn
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The reality of a tough economy has already come for many small businesses, as indicated by the over 10% quarter-by-quarter increase in the number of business bankruptcy filings over the last few quarters. Downsizing, smaller budgets, and more fickle customers mean that small business owners need ways to get their employees to work better as a unit to improve customer care. One tool that can assist in this effort is appointment software. Appointment software can unify your team’s schedules and provide real time information about employee-customer relations.
2009
Doing More With Less Using Self Service Offerings
In a down economy, everyone is being asked to do more with less: less space, fewer resources, reduced workforce, and a really tight budget. At the same time, high levels of customer service are expected.
Now more than ever, businesses are in a crunch to stay competitive. An online article in Entrepreneur, “Real World Cost-Cutting Practices,” features companies meeting these challenges without sacrificing customer experience. They’ve gotten creative in order to survive, and they’ve come up with innovative ways to cut costs without affecting customer loyalty.
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2009
Airlines and X-Rays: Customer Service in Capacity-Based Businesses
I had a shower-stall epiphany yesterday, a collision between thoughts rattling around in my head. I saw a pattern that spans many unrelated industries: customer service in capacity-based businesses.
It hit me because of events in two vastly different industries a week earlier:
- That Sunday I was on the phone with Southwest Airlines, and their system said “Our hold time is unusually long. If you want our system to call you when it’s your turn, press 1.”
- Two days later I had my adventure with the x-ray appointment (not) at a local clinic.
What do airlines and x-rays have in common? Both are capacity-based, which means customers need to be matched up with availability. And there’s a world of difference in how these two managed the customer experience.
- Southwest had their robot do the waiting, so I didn’t have to.
The clinic has lots of friendly, courteous people, but responsibility for my waiting time apparently hasn’t dawned on them. “Come on in, and we’ll get to you when we can.”
Think about this. Waiting stinks (and is a costly waste of time), so what ways can you think of to improve the customer experience?
Later this week I’ll return to this, but give it some thought. Maybe in the shower.
For a refresher on the cost (and value) of people’s waiting time, see our very first post: It’s RUDE to make people wait. And costly. That’s where this photo first appeared. It’s a real-life case study.
Filed under: online scheduling, scheduling software
Tagged: customer experience, customer service, healthcare, impatience, waiting
2009
The Software-as-a-Service Conversation – and Conversion – is Alive and Going Strong
I participated as a panelist in a Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council event this morning focused on the marketing and sales opportunities and challenges with moving to and supporting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. TimeTrade’s personal appointment scheduler TimeDriver and many of our enterprise solution customers leverage our technology through a SaaS-based model.
The major benefit of SaaS – and something we obviously feel strongly about – is driving better customer service and delivering a great customer experience. We as service providers get to know our customers almost on a first-name basis through offering on-demand solutions and understand real-time how they are using our services/applications. We’re able to leverage our customers’ great ideas and feedback quickly to enable new capabilities that helps them improve their business. If something needs to be addressed, we know it right away and can respond. Not possible with licensed or packaged applications.
One of the many companies speaking this morning was Constant Contact – a company who has leveraged SaaS and the customer experience to be the leader in email marketing and online surveys.
On-demand has reshaped how companies, like ours, do business. Marketing has moved from traditional methods such as print advertising to leveraging Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and analysis tools, creating vertically-focused promotions and offering free trials to virally drive adoption. Results are measured real-time rather than quarterly enabling our marketing programs to be much more effective and focused.
Being reported constantly in the news is the trend that the companies who will succeed in this challenging economic environment are those that define themselves by delivering the ultimate in customer service. SaaS certainly is a platform to help drive customer satisfaction and create customer promoters.
Filed under: online scheduling, scheduling software
Tagged: customer experience, customer service, saas
2009
Customer experience is not just post-sale: Social Media gets clearer, part 2
Recap of part 1:
On March 25 I saw a presentation by Brian Haven, self-described “recovering Forrester analyst,” that answered once and for all any question I had about whether “all this social media stuff” is just buzzwords. It’s not. The fundamental nature of marketing conversations has indeed changed.
But how to make sense of it all?
As Part 1 showed, if you think your “marketing pipeline” is still a linear process it’s time to update your thinking. Prerequisite for this post: please quickly read part 1, which contains foundation thinking for this post, with important illustrations.
The importance of influencers in today’s uncontrollable “funnel”
Part 1 ended with this observation about today’s marketing world:
The old funnel is pretty much shot, because the conversation goes every whichway, with all kinds of influences along the way. Not only that, but in reality today there’s more than one output: some people emerge as buyers, but everyone else comes out as influencers who’ll be the input to other people’s decisions later.
Speaker Brian Haven then mentioned Forrester’s “Four I’s” model of engagement: Influence, Involvement, Interaction and Intimacy, and how these interlock into the four phases of the “engagement wheel”: Discovery, Evaluation, Use, and Affinity:
Here’s how the wheel works:
- On the left, a future customer’s engagement starts with Discovery: one way or another s/he becomes aware of you, may be influenced by what others have said, and begins to get involved: exploring your web site, visiting stores, etc.
- As the visitor becomes Involved (bottom left), Discovery moves through to Evaluation, then to Use.
- As customer and vendor get to know each other and Intimacy builds, Use leads to Affinity.
The User becomes an influencer – one of those enigmatic, uncontrollable inputs who in today’s world can muck up (or turbocharge) our previously neat view of the pipeline.
All that makes sense, but the mind-pop came when the familiar metrics were overlaid onto the quadrants. Suddenly everything falls into place:
Examples:
- Likelihood to Recommend plays its role in the Influence phase
- Unique Site Visitors is relevant to the Discovery phase, as people are beginning to get Involved
- Someone who actively comments on a blog is at a deeper level of engagement: Interaction
There’s no particular item in the wheel I hadn’t heard of. But that’s the thing about a good mental model: it takes things you already knew, and provides a useful way of looking at them.
Without structure and framework, social media is a blizzard of conversations – as confusing as that contorted “pipeline” we saw last time. But with this framework, when we ask “Why is TimeTrade on Twitter?” we can point to specific conversations and understand: “This time, we were helping with Discovery. This time, we were rescuing loyalty, to build Affinity.” And so on.
At last, social media gets clearer, its value becomes tangible. So thanks, Brian; that was the most valuable breakfast meeting I’ve ever been to.
TimeTrade on Twitter: Me: @TimeTradeBlog TimeDriver support: @TimeDriver
2009
SaaS Success: Bringing enterprise lessons to personal appointments
An article by TimeTrade CEO Ed Mallen appeared today on GigaOm and was cross-posted to Salon.com. We’re only allowed to show you the lead paragraph…
One of the key sales criteria in the enterprise application space — and one of the greatest development challenges — is the ability to scale. At TimeTrade we have met that challenge, creating a successful business selling SaaS-based applications that enable very large organizations and businesses to schedule and manage millions of appointments. …
For the whole story including the six tips, please do visit GigaOm or Salon.
Filed under: online scheduling, scheduling software
Tagged: efficiency, ROI, saas
2009
Making it through the downdraft, Part 2: Collaborate more efficiently
Yesterday I read a post by Web Informant blogger David Strom, echoing what I’d just said the other day: To survive and prosper in this economy, people are going to need to learn a new level of efficiency. He writes:
I want to see opportunity where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to make things better is become more productive and do a better job collaborating with each other.
He’s right, and this became easier to see when I reduced it from concepts to the concrete.
See, when I hear about the economy as a whole – a million jobs here, $700B there – it seems abstract, all too much, too big for us to solve. But when I bring it down to human scale the truth becomes visible:
- It’s personal, not abstract. Those are real people losing those jobs, and those are real dollars they’ll no longer spend. To paraphrase Tip O’Neill, all economics is local.
- There are things I can do all around me to “nip and tuck,” making things a little more efficient. That efficiency amounts to money I’ve saved, for myself or my company. And that can save jobs.
This is the opportunity Strom points to.
Look, nobody likes to talk about it, but everyone I know is aware of layoffs around them. Six people in my family or my chorus have lost their jobs this year. (Oops, seven since I first drafted this.) But we as Americans and we as global citizens are far from being out of ingenuity. We will manage our way through it, proactively or reactively.
My advice: be proactive about efficiency. Find better ways to collaborate, find ways to nip and tuck. Most of all, as Strom says, notice when you’re wasting time, and knock it off!
Related content: for a real-life example of how our TimeDriver personal scheduler improves efficiency for a realty coach, read TimeDriver eliminates tedious scheduling time for driven real estate coach. She says it saves three days a month of back and forth making appointments!
Filed under: appointment scheduler, scheduling software
Tagged: collaboration, downturn, economy, efficiency
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