If your business has a high volume of appointments to track, paper calendars or even a free appointment scheduler aren’t going to cut it—you need an enterprise-grade scheduling solution. All of your clients, prospects, and team members deserve a high-quality appointment scheduling experience, from the moment they first hear about your business to the post-appointment engagement.
So, how do you organize appointments and schedules in a way that boosts productivity, maximizes team efficiency, and creates happy and loyal clients? Let’s take a look.
How to Effectively Schedule Appointments
The best way to effectively schedule appointments is with an online appointment booking system. We live in a world where people conduct many of their daily personal and professional tasks online, like making purchases, reading the news, researching a new product, getting directions, or finding a service they need. Online appointment scheduling serves as an extension to these everyday digital activities, creating a seamless path from interest to action.
Consider how a financial institution, for example, might integrate appointment scheduling into their already existing online presence. They could:
- Prominently display a click-to-schedule button on their most popular pages.
- Install a persistent link to schedule an appointment on the header or footer across their entire website.
- Have a clear scheduling call-to-action (CTA) button on their homepage or location pages to greet visitors right away.
- Include CTAs to schedule in other high-traffic places, like email campaigns and social media posts.
- Funnel all scheduling clicks to one page with self-scheduling options for booking in-branch, over the phone, or virtual appointments.
- Offer various types of appointments to choose from, like opening a new account, loan options, business borrowing, or safety deposit box access.
- Add “schedule an appointment” links to multiple resources, like eBooks, blog posts, whitepapers, etc.
- Use Reserve with Google to add scheduling links through Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Assistant.
By providing all of these options and more, you show your prospects and clients you’re willing to meet them wherever they are in their journey with your business.
Now, getting folks to schedule appointments is only half the battle. The next task lies in how you track and manage the volume of appointments across one or many different locations.
How Do You Schedule and Keep Track of Appointments and Meetings?
This is where your online appointment scheduling system will do the bulk of the work. Here are three ideas of how this can function for your organization.
1. Anticipation
Every single best practice for business starts with the same concept—know your clients so you can anticipate their needs.
- Are they looking for information to make a decision?
- Have they already made a purchase and need some follow-up assistance?
- Are they a long-time client looking to get more out of your products and services?
Your CRM is a rich resource for this, but you need to make sure your CRM can communicate properly with your scheduling system. Engageware’s appointment scheduling platform records this crucial data to a CRM, like Salesforce. This gives your team a 360-degree view that empowers digital transformations and drives customer-centric initiatives and next-best actions.
When you have all of this information in a central location, you can improve your team’s schedule management and pre-appointment research. This can reduce cancellations, no-shows, and double bookings, keeping all your appointments well organized for success. And when it comes time for each appointment, your team will have all the answers clients and prospects need at their fingertips.
2. Automation
Automation is vital for tracking hundreds or thousands of client appointments. A couple helpful automated scheduling features to look for are:
- Automated Reminders – It’s so easy to forget an appointment when you’re juggling dozens of other obligations. Make it easy for your clients to remember with automated text and email reminders. Be sure to include all the relevant information they need for the appointment, like time, place, and documents to bring for making the meeting as productive as possible.
- Appointment Routing – Every appointment will have a unique purpose and resolution. With Engageware, you can take advantage of smart resource matching, enabling you to match the unique requirements of each appointment request with the resource, location, and skillset to best help each individual customer.
3. Personalization
A recent survey of nearly 33,000 financial services consumers found that people still want a personalized touch. In fact, 63% of respondents stated that when they share their data with their financial institution, they expect the resulting banking experience to be more personalized.
Your personalization efforts need to go beyond seasonal campaigns and marketing emails. By offering online appointment scheduling options, you show clients and prospects that you’re ready to jump in and help out at any time. It puts them in the driver’s seat to reach out when they need you, taking a significant burden off your team when it comes to making, managing and tracking appointments.
How to Schedule Appointments With Clients Using Engageware
The best practices and appointment system features discussed in this blog are only the beginning. With Engageware, businesses can streamline the entire appointment process, making your clients and prospects feel appreciated, cared for, and heard. They know they can come to you for products or services whenever they need—with only a few clicks of a button.
If you’re looking for a better way to track your growing number of appointments, consider Engageware for your business’s scheduling needs. Ready to learn how you can engage your customers more efficiently and effectively? Let’s find a time to talk.