How many times have you gotten home from work and realized that you forgot to call your mechanic to make an appointment? How about forgotten to call your hairdresser for a haircut? What often ends up happening is you call and leave a message asking for an appointment. Then you spend the next couple of days playing phone tag trying to schedule your appointment. There is an alternative. There are applications that allow clients to schedule their own appointments online. For example, I can not only schedule an appointment with my hairdresser* online, I can change or cancel my appointment time. I even recently scheduled a car repair online. These applications are being adopted slowly, but it I am seeing them used more and more .
I appreciate the flexibility of being able to schedule online so much, that it is now something I factor in when choosing a service provider. If I have two options that are equivalent in most ways, I will choose the one that lets me schedule my appointment online. To date, I have never had two equivalent service providers who both offered online scheduling.
My clients who use appointment setting apps are all microbusinesses, so their focus is on the lower end of the market. There are several comparably priced options out there (I won’t mention any names because I don’t want any implied endorsements) that have basically the same set of features. The feature my clients appreciate most are the automatic reminders. Reminders can be set to go to a client’s email or send a text message. This takes the burden of reminder calls off the practitioner, which is a huge time-saver. The complaints I have heard include:
- The landing page isn’t customizable
- The application can’t be embedded into a website
- The application doesn’t allow simultaneous appointments
- The time between clients is a fixed number
I have noticed that health practitioners (acupuncturists, chiropractors and massage therapists) that use appointment setting applications are often resistant to fully embracing their functionality. I have several clients who use online appointment applications for their automatic reminder features, but don’t let their patients actually schedule their visits. Their reasons generally fall into one (or both) of two categories. Either the applications aren’t adequately flexible or they just don’t feel their patients are savvy enough to use the application appropriately.
I agree that several of the low-end appointment scheduling apps can be improved significantly. But I don’t think those improvements will happen until they are more widely adopted. So, if you want the convenience of scheduling your appointments online, suggest it to the person providing the service.
*The woman who cuts my hair just went on indefinite maternity leave. Anyone have a recommendation for someone who gets that any haircut I get needs to be wash and wear? That no matter how good the product is, I just won’t put it in my hair.