How to Know When to Move Your Business to Self-Service Scheduling

Original Publication: Customer Management Insight - October 2008
View Online

Businesses of all kinds are under increased competitive pressure to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty while controlling costs. Providing customer self-service can significantly impact these issues, and many industries have already moved to this model. The travel industry, bank ATMs, portrait scheduling within large retailers, and online booksellers are everyday examples of businesses that successfully offer 24/7 access to serve customers better. Forrester Research estimates that an average Web self-service session costs $1, compared to $10 for email responses and $33 for a phone call.

Customer scheduling is often a very complex and costly process, especially if your business spans multiple locations. And valuable customer data can be lost if scheduling is done manually, adding to inefficiencies. Moving scheduling to 24/7 self-service can present a great opportunity to improve customer retention and loyalty while increasing business. It also smoothes demand for walk-in services so businesses can better estimate the resources required to handle anticipated customer volume.

But how do you know if the time is right for your company to move to self-service scheduling?

If your business sells time as a perishable inventory that is monetized — be it anything from consulting, dog grooming, bridal fittings, photo studio portraits to health diagnostics, fitness centers or technical support services — you might consider self-service scheduling. Improving customer convenience in this challenging business environment is critical. The Patricia Seybold Group estimates that the average company loses 10 percent of its customers every year and decreasing that defection rate by only 5 percent translates to profit increases that can range from 25 percent to 125 percent. Customers remain loyal because of good products, reasonable prices, and a strong customer experience. Self-service scheduling can definitely improve the customer experience.

Your customers are busy people too! Imagine if they no longer were restricted to business hours for scheduling time with you and could easily book their appointments from home or anywhere at any time of the night or day. All they would need is a computer and an Internet browser to visit your Web site — offering an opportunity to market your services. With one click of a scheduling button on your site they can find out what times are available for the services they require and secure their appointment.

Change to a business’s workflow however can be daunting, but it is not impossible if you follow some guidelines and best practices when considering this new self-service scheduling model.

How to Know if Self-Scheduling Fits Your Business

Your first step in evaluating self-service should be to consider the business challenges that self-service appointment scheduling can address and see if any or all of them align with your company’s current business challenges.

• Would you like better management visibility into utilization of resources across your operations? Do you want real-time access to better metrics that measure the effectiveness of your operations?

• Would you like to smooth demand throughout the day to better utilize resources?

• Are you managing not only staff resources, but also facilities and equipment as part of the scheduling process?

• Is the capture and confirmation of, and reminders for, appointments done manually and are there costs associated with the manual process that you would like to alleviate?

• How accurate is your appointment setting process – do you experience a high rate of “no shows” and double booking?

• Does rescheduling appointments or making last-minute resource changes wreak havoc on your scheduling process and workflow?

• Do you have different types of appointments that need to be scheduled? Are there multiple departments or groups within your company that schedule appointments? Do they all have their own unique scheduling processes?

• Have you experienced customer dissatisfaction or loss of business due to long wait times?

• How well do you know your customers, their preferences and patterns? How is this customer information captured today?

• Do you have a Web site? And how aggressively do you leverage the site for marketing purposes? Do you want to better leverage your Web site to help build your brand?

• Do you want to increase the number of appointments you can schedule in order to grow your business but have been challenged in doing so?

Selecting a Self-Service Solution

After this analysis, if you have decided that self-service scheduling over the Web might be a good solution for your business, the next step is to evaluate what to look for in a solution that will enable you to optimize the scheduling experience. You should also survey your repeat customers to find out if they would prefer self-service scheduling if it were offered.

To maximize the appointment scheduling process, a Web-based, self-service solution should be able to:

• Scale to handle any number of appointments across multiple locations or for a single location;

• Schedule multiple resources including staff, equipment, facilities;

• Provide the ability to adjust in real time;

• Be easily used and configured for your specific business application and workflow to minimize the impact on your staff;

• Enable you to set up rules that meet your desired business workflow (e.g., specify the length of an appointment based on the type of service requested or enable customers to select a preferred consultant);

• Provide management reporting on utilization of resources such as daily schedule summaries and individual customer appointment sheets;

• Enable the capture of relevant information to better prepare for the appointment before the customer arrives and for further sales opportunities in the future;

• Automatically confirm appointments through email and offer the ability to include “tips,” directions and additional appointment-related information;

• Automatically send email, SMS or voice reminders;

• Seamlessly integrate with other business systems if required, including billing, CRM and other applications.

Ideally, you will choose an on-demand self-scheduling solution, which eliminates the requirement to purchase and maintain software. On-demand self-service scheduling also minimizes IT involvement and significantly reduces training requirements.

Certainly self-service scheduling can be introduced while your manual process continues. This provides time for your staff to point customers to the Website and ensure their comfort (as well as your staff’s) with the new workflow.

Reap the Benefits

The benefits of customer self-service can be dramatic and include:

• Increased sales

• Lower administrative costs

• Reduction/elimination of errors and no shows

• Improved staff accountability

• Increased customer satisfaction and

• Freed-up valuable staff resources to focus on sales or other activities

Additionally, scheduling appointments over the Web can add rules to the scheduling process so that the same information is gathered each time and doesn’t differ depending on who is booking the appointment. This ensures accuracy and consistency.

Avoid the Pitfalls

While this all this might sound good, you may be wondering if there are any pitfalls to avoid when moving to self-service scheduling. Remarkably there are very few:

• Don’t over-analyze the impact on your employees of changing the workflow. Most employees welcome the change, especially if they are made part of the process. The world has moved to the Web and putting your business out front in accepting and leveraging technology only makes them feel better about their potential for success.

• Don’t try to over-customize a self-service solution. By evaluating a solution against the guidelines mentioned earlier, you will be ready to make it easy and efficient for you and for your customers.

• Don’t assume that you have to move directly (or wholly) to Web-based self-service. By utilizing a call center, you can implement assisted-service scheduling first, then offer/move to self-service scheduling. Your customer demographics will help you decide the right approach for your company.

• If you have multiple locations, don’t think you need to roll out self-service scheduling to all locations simultaneously. Consider initiating the project in early-adopter locations first, then roll out to other sites once you can demonstrate success — both quantitatively and qualitatively — through the early adopters.

• Be organized before you implement self-service scheduling — know the goals and benefits you want to achieve, the information you want to gather, the rules you want followed in scheduling appointments, and the metrics you want to set to ensure that you are fully leveraging the benefits.

Stay Competitive

The risks in not considering self-service scheduling are that your competitors provide this capability before you do. Many successful businesses have shifted much of their e-commerce to the Web as well as appointment scheduling. Virtually all the major portrait studios, including Sears, Wal-Mart, Target, JC Penney and Ritz Camera, have adopted self-service scheduling. Many healthcare facilities offering imaging and diagnostics are smoothing demand with self-service, and major retailers that are building brand with differentiated services are also moving in this direction. An example is the Apple retail stores, which implemented self-service scheduling to enable customers to set a time to meet with experts at Apple’s Genius Bar to get technical questions answered and receive guidance on products.

There is a sea change occurring in forward-thinking organizations that see the value of empowering their customers to make their own appointment. Is it time to move your business to self-service scheduling?

Ed Mallen is CEO of Time Trade Systems. www.timetrade.com