Did you know: 69% of customers prefer online booking to picking up the phone? AND, if you don’t have an online booking system, 59% of customers will go elsewhere.
🔎Imagine that a customer is looking for a service and has researched relevant companies online. Your business appears in the search results, but you only provide a telephone number.
Your potential customer doesn’t have time to sit on the phone so they move on and go with a company that allows them to book online instead.
Having the technology in place to make it easy for customers to see your availability and book jobs without having to pick up the phone is one of the most effective strategies to improve customer experience (CX).
In this blog, we’ll show you how implementing online job scheduling helps to provide a positive customer experience.
Top four ways online scheduling software can improve customer experience
🗓️Easy and seamless customer experience
The most important step to improve customer experience is ensuring your availability is easy to see through your website or your application.
Customers want to easily book your services for the times and dates they need your services. If you can’t offer this, they will likely go to your competitors who offer this functionality.
How can online scheduling software help?
✅Enables customers to log in to schedule or reschedule appointments
✅Increases customer satisfaction rate
✅Reduces administrative work for your back-office team
✅Allows your team to allocate and reallocate resources based on location, traffic information, job constraints, and vehicle type
✅Customers are allocated the best and nearest resource for the job
Allowing customers to go straight to your website or an application and book an appointment at a time that suits them allows you to offer a great customer experience.
Not only can they book an appointment at a time that suits them, but they can also go online and book any time without having to wait for your office to open.
Additionally, your back office staff spends less time on administrative tasks and more on tasks that can help grow your business, boosting your bottom line.
📩Keep customers informed
Services such as Uber and Deliveroo keep customers updated on the status of their orders and have changed customer expectations.
👉In fact, 77% of customers consider a company’s customer experience to be just as important as the quality of its products and services.
So, it is essential to provide customers with transparency about their job status and their technician’s location on the day of their appointment.
Not only does this improve customers' overall satisfaction with your service by removing the need for them to wait around unnecessarily, but it also frees your customer service team from fielding calls all day.
⚒️So, how can you provide this?
Live tracking software allows your back-office team to understand exactly where your technicians are.
Additionally, customers will be provided with a link to show technicians’ live locations for every job they order.
Sending automatic updates to customers notifying them of the technician’s estimated arrival time and job completion status via email and text means they don’t even need to check the platform.
Your technicians can also be provided with a mobile app that keeps them connected to your back-office staff. This allows them to remain updated on real-time schedule changes, ensuring they turn up on time for every job, equipped with the correct tools. All of which help to improve customer experience.
📅Make recurring appointments easy
In addition to allowing customers to book an appointment online at a time that suits them, online scheduling software can also allow you to set up recurring jobs.
As a result, this removes the burden on both customers and back-office staff to remember to book repeat appointments.
Automating and making scheduling easier for customers makes your services faster and easier, one of the best ways to improve customer satisfaction.
⚒️How can job scheduling software help?
You can provide recurring job templates if you have clients who want to schedule recurring jobs. You can create groups of jobs to complete so you and your customers can schedule all required work for the group in one go.
Storing customer information in a CRM allows you to store all customer information so, if a job needs additional work, you can automatically fill a new job with the information.
This will include:
✅Job contract
✅Original job details
✅Skills
✅Constraints
✅Financial line items
✅Comments about the job
The ability to automatically fill in these details reduces the amount of administration required, saving time for your back-office staff and improving the customer experience for customers who don’t need to relay job details more than once.
💁A personalised customer experience
Personalisation is becoming increasingly important when it comes to meeting customer expectations.
In fact, 59% of customers find personalised engagement based on past interactions crucial for repeated interactions with a business. Plus, a complicated booking process can prevent customers from returning to you again.
Offering personalised customer experiences provides a number of benefits, including:
✅Improves customer retention and loyalty
✅Builds trust with customers
✅Helps to drive profits
✅Shows customers your business cares
✅Increases word-of-mouth recommendations
⚒️How can job scheduling software help?
You might automate customer interactions across the entire customer journey but you don’t want to think the interactions are from a robot.
Having job management software in place helps you to deliver a highly personalised experience to all of your customers.
A CRM system allows you to:
- Save all customer data
- Keep a record of previous bookings
- Provide the ability to auto-fill fields
- Gather customer feedback
All of this helps to make the booking, rebooking and payment processes run much more smoothly for your customers, providing them with a better, more personalised experience.
Key takeaways
The days of always having to call to schedule a service are over.
Customers expect businesses to use improved technology to meet their needs and, the faster you provide this service, the better. Improving customer satisfaction with online scheduling will always start with how you list your availability to customers.
Takeaway #1: Online job scheduling software enables your customers to schedule and reschedule jobs with ease. Plus, automated messages show clients if your technicians are on schedule and will improve customer satisfaction by reducing their need to check on job status.
Takeaway #2: Additionally, you can free up time for back-office staff by eliminating repetitive admin tasks, allowing them to focus on providing an excellent customer experience.
Takeaway #3: Finally, job scheduling is taken completely out of your hands by allowing resources to self-allocate jobs, fulfilling more client orders, resulting in faster service and boosting your business’ bottom line.
Find out how BigChange can help your business, book a free consultation today.
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