No Lines, No Waiting
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Category Archives: appointment scheduler
2009
Personal Appointment Software May Just Save Your Job
In the face of close to 10% U.S. unemployment, employees may be wondering what they can do to increase their value. Online appointment software may just be the answer. It is a tool to manage two resources that often are poorly handled: time and relationships. With more companies watching what employees do, it may be time to seriously consider a change in how you go about your job.
Setting appointments with online appointment software allows you to be organized with your time and communicates to others (including your boss) that both your time and the time of others is something that you value. Aren’t supervisors looking for employees who are focused, organized, efficient, and place a value on the company’s best interest?
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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
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
The Psychology of Waiting Lines: why appointments are important
On Monday I mentioned The Psychology of Waiting Lines. Consider this, from the introduction:
…the waiting-line experience in a service facility significantly affects our overall perceptions of the quality of service provided .. the bitter taste of how long it took to get attention pollutes the overall judgments that we make about the quality of service. [emphasis added]
That was 1985, but it’s still true today, yes? The penalties for making people wait were clear, and still are. But back then it was costly to prevent waits by offering appointments. It was a different world: the Mac and PC had just been introduced, it was nine years before the first web browser, seven years before the 
Motorola Bag Phone that would be my first “car phone,” and author David Maister talks about waiting in line at Eastern Airlines, worrying that if he hands them his paper ticket, he might not get it back.
Today none of that’s true – except that the penalties for making people wait are still valid.
We don’t use “bag phones,” we all have cell phones. Eastern is gone, and heck, we print our own boarding passes at home. So I have to wonder, why do we still make customers wait?
Filed under: appointment scheduler
Tagged: appointment scheduling, customer experience, customer satisfaction, waiting
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
2009
It’s RUDE to make people wait. And costly.
DMDC, the Defense Manpower Data Center, handles issuing security credentials for the Department of Homeland Security. “People show up at the enrollment centers at different times on different days,” explains Rick Pratt, identification management specialist at Electronic Data Systems (EDS), the prime contractor supporting the Defense Department’s (DoD’s) card issuing process. “The centers would be empty some days, and some days they would be packed.” DMDC has about 900 sites with more than 2,000 workstations issuing common access cards (CACs.) Issuing the identification takes about 15 minutes if there are no delays, but applicants sometimes reported waiting five hours due to long lines.
Wouldn’t that just frustrate you? And if it were a store, wouldn’t it affect your loyalty?
Well, they installed a TimeTrade appointment scheduling system, and now that doesn’t happen. People who need credentials go online and make an appointment 24/7. They check their calendar at their leisure, see what slots are available, and pick one. No more wondering how long they’ll be away from the office, no more walking in and going “Oh crap” when they see the lines.
Does it work? DMDC did what everyone should do: they asked their “customers.” In a large-scale online survey, 95% of respondents said they’d recommend self-service appointment scheduling to others. Reasons included ease of use, efficient use of their time, and elimination of unpredictable in-person wait times.
In other words, 95% of people surveyed like it when rudeness is replaced with good customer service. We doubt we’ll win a Nobel for that discovery, but you do have to ask: Why doesn’t everyone do it?
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