Technology makes our life easy and hassle-free. Especially, with the increasing penetration of the internet and smartphones. A majority of people depend on smartphones to perform day-to-day tasks like getting information, shopping, booking services, finding ways, handling social media, and more. One more important feature that you see is appointment scheduling via the website or mobile app. Leading mobile app development companies are helping sectors like healthcare, salon, cleaning companies, school, or any organization to enable this feature. Thus, booking your slot online brings great convenience for customers and enterprises.
If you are into any of the above-mentioned services or a different one, then enable the appointment scheduling feature that might increase your revenue by 35-40% more. You are missing something in big time if you still rely on the offline or manual appointment scheduling process.
Thus, an online appointment scheduling feature should be your priority to attract more customers, retain existing ones, smoothens the customer & employee journey, and bring more precision to track reports and customer flow.
In this blog, we will be taking you through the experience of creating an appointment booking feature related to its types, features, and benefits.
Let’s get started.
Allow Customers to Book Appointments Online
Booking an online service is trending these days. The pioneer enterprise app development services comprise of online appointment feature for companies to drive more sales. As opposed to your customers calling the reception desk and ask for an appointment, online booking enables a direct interaction in less time. It allows you to showcase the list of services online along with available slots for customers to book at any point in time. Companies can update information related to service details, concerned person, pictures, descriptions, and more. On top of that, employees will also see the booked slots to track and analyze.
Two Types of Booking Flow
1. Guest Booking
Any new user can book an appointment using personal details like name, email id, or phone number without creating the profile.
2. Booking via User Profile
Another is logging into the app or website, see the slots, and click on book an appointment. This flow helps users to get personalized offers, deals, and regular notifications. You can enable the APIs of Facebook and Google that allow users to sign-in with a single click.
What to Expect from Online Booking Scheduling Feature
A booking appointment scheduling functionality for your website or app has a plethora of useful features. You should consider every single point we mention here to understand what to expect from it.
Manage Appointments Diary Online
An offline way of noting and managing customer’s appointments is always cumbersome. You need to refer to numerous paper jacket material for finding the customer name and previous session details.
The On demand delivery app development feature of online scheduling helps to keep the data in one scheduling system. It helps managing the bookings that are pending/canceled/scheduled by merely typing on the system. Additionally, it will help in ease of the burden of employees to find customer’s details here and there.
Appointment scheduling features bring an effortless way to look at available slots, timings, and services. It allows customers to book the appointment online using an app or website. Even the company’s employees can avoid making mistakes and perform convenient responsibilities mentioned below.
* Edit Appointments: It helps your employee receive a notification of a booked slot he/she can manually accept or cancel the appointment depending on the availability. Also, they can manually add open appointment slots into the system with fewer efforts.
* Change Status: There is an excellent feature for accepting or canceling the appointment. Also, the employee can change the status to Booked, Open, Cancelled, or Not Available.
* Send Personalized Notifications: Just like the scheduling app Square, you can also approve or disapprove booked appointments and send a personalized notification to customers related to the current status.
* Minimize Human Error: With increasing flexibility, agility, and adaptability of the online booking system, employees will make fewer mistakes on an operational level. It further helps to increase your company’s operational efficiency and reduce cost also.
Employee Management
If you are into a service provider’s business offering services like hairstylists, plumbing, cleaning, or anything like that, then online booking is a boon for you.
Just understand, when you have an online booking scheduling feature enabled the on app/website. You will be able to assign a separate appointment calendar to all the vendors on different pages. It will feature details like Vendor’s information, available slots, prices, and services. This allows customers to specifically find a service provider on your business website/application, book a slot, and avail of the service.
There would be no such hassle for the company’s employees to check the availability of service provider and customer. Online booking brings a smooth flow of operational and increasing revenue benefits to your company.
Also, provide the following access to specific individuals:
* Admin Panel: This is your panel to see details like service providers, schedules, booked appointments, management section, tariffs, and more.
* Senior Employee: They have access to profiles of service providers and customers.
* Viewer: It allows seeing services of different service providers, available schedule, services, and pricing.
Receive Payment
You must have been companies charging a fee for cancelling the appointment at the last moment. Even some enterprises ask for a small deposit fee to book an appointment online. It brings a safe zone for businesses to manage operations without inducing monetary loss.
Add deposit or cancellation fee feature in your online scheduling website or application. Not only, it will simplify things for you but also receive payments without incurring any loss.
Analyze Enterprise Performance
It is a data-driven world, we all live in. An online scheduling feature on your business website/app helps to collect insight information. Be it like customer’s demographics, booking/retention rate, cancellation, re-booking, no-show, and more, it captures all the information. All this helps to analyze business information and make a strategic move to increase overall ROI.
Best Way to Lower the Rate of No-Shows/ Cancellations
It is another side of the picture related to managing No-Show cases. It has often been witnessed that some of the customers who have already booked a service appointment do not show up at the end. Now, it has a huge impact on the operational expenditures of enterprises who have their slots allotted to such customers.
The ideal remedy to avoid loss under no-shows and cancellations is enabling the following solutions into the online scheduling feature.
* Add a Cancellation Policy: Create a cancellation policy that every single user will agree to it. This should include a cancellation fee properly visible at the customer’s and enterprise’s end. In case, a user cancels the appointment before time, there would be no cancellation fee charged.
* Create a Waitlist: A waitlist helps you to include people apart from no-shows and cancellations. It allows customers to fill the position who are interested in the service but the slot was not available earlier.
Summing Up
The online scheduling feature is a boon for enterprises to handle customer’s appointments conveniently. Even employee management would be hassle-free to take care of appointment loads, approve or disapprove requests with a single click.
If you are interested in adding an online scheduling feature to your business application/website, then hire mobile app developers from Mobi India. One of the leading app development companies, offer Android, iOS, and React Native app development services to a wide range of industry verticals.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the Benefit of Enabling Online Scheduling Feature?
Online scheduling for booking/canceling service appointments is a useful feature for enterprises to manage customer flows relentlessly. It enables to edit appointments online, manage customers efficiently, charge a cancellation fee, and lower human errors for optimum operational benefit. It can be healthcare, beauty, sports, cleaning, or any other service for which you can add the technically efficient feature in the website/application.
2. In How Much Time Will This Feature be Added in Application?
It all depends on the nature of features and internal functionalities you like to add to an application or website. Enabling different payment gateways, adding APIs of social media & Google, adding Google Maps, etc are different features to consider before developing.
3. How Do you Charge for Mobile App Development Services?
Here at Mobi India, we offer flexible mobile app developers hiring models along with cost-effective solutions to clients. Either you can call for fixed cost or hourly basis services to enable online appointment scheduling or any other development in mobile app/website.
