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Set Your Brand Apart with Web-Based Scheduling
May 19, 2008
By Chris Murphy
Let's face it: The challenges of differentiating your product or services to customers and prospects are more complex than ever. Sales consulting firm CSO Insights points to the collapse of sustainable product uniqueness, compressed product lifecycles and increased competitive activity as the reasons why how you sell is becoming more important than what you sell.
The first step—and often, the first obstacle to selling a product or service—is setting the appointment. Doing so affords the perfect opportunity to move the prospect forward. You can find out more about their areas of interest, capture their contact information and leverage the confirmation process to offer them tips or suggestions to optimize the meeting.
But if setting the appointment is handled manually, it can be inefficient and costly. More importantly, you can miss opportunities to build customer satisfaction.
The combination of the availability of innovative technology solutions and the widespread use of the Web by your customers and prospects can help drive a decision to move to either self-service or assisted-service appointment scheduling. Self-service appointment scheduling lets your prospects or customers set appointments directly over the Web—a task they can perform at their convenience.
Assisted-service scheduling leverages the same Web-based approach, but puts it in the hands of call or contact centers. This better equips center agents to eliminate double bookings, callbacks or any transfers or handoffs that might lose the selling opportunity.
Below are six sales issues and opportunities that can be addressed by a move to Web-based scheduling to improve closed-loop marketing and sales.
1. Leverage customer information trapped in appointment books. Customer preferences, meeting or services history and timing can all be captured during the appointment setting process, but is not readily available if gathered manually. Gathering the information electronically, however, also provides sales management with a better understanding of resource utilization across locations and drives accountability
In addition, if staff members leave, customer information doesn't walk out with them. Rather than remaining restricted to static information, businesses using Web-based scheduling can continue to close the loop with customers by ensuring their service or products are well received and offer a personal touch with tips, offers and reminders.
2. Improve the customer experience and build loyalty. If prospects and customers face wait times for your service, often they will leave and not return. Are you fully prepared for a customer at appointment time in order to optimize their experience?
Customers will feel as if they are receiving more personalized service if, through self-service or assisted-service appointment setting, you determine in advance the right financial consultant, photographer, technician or any other type of "resource" for them and identify the facilities and equipment required. Web-based scheduling enables the consistent capture of information so that the customer and the service provider are both completely ready for the meeting.
3. Drive more appointments. Self-service appointment scheduling, readily available on your Website or through e-mail, makes it easy for people to do business with you. These days, time is at a premium for everyone, and a clear differentiator in the sales process can be the ability for the prospect to "just click" and schedule a meeting or service. If a prospect has to chase after you to schedule time or engage in voicemail tag to find a time convenient for both parties, the risk of losing the prospect is high.
4. Generate repeat business. Special offers, reminders and personal invitations are a great way to urge a customer to buy your services or products again and re-engage with you. A targeted e-mail with an easy call-to-action embedded within has a strong response because it demonstrates that you know your customers, their buying habits and have made it easy to take the next step. With Web-based appointment scheduling, the customer information is captured and enables branded and personalized communications.
5. Reduce overhead costs while increasing customer satisfaction. A drain on profits often can be attributed to the under-utilization of resources. For example, a diagnostic center might see an overflow of customers showing up for blood tests first thing in the morning, requiring extra staffing. Later in the day the center might not have many customers, but the staff has to be paid. Web-based scheduling offers the opportunity to smooth out resource requirements throughout the day.
6. Eliminate errors in the scheduling process. Web-based appointment scheduling enables you to set the rules you want to follow and develop the questions you want answered prior to delivering the service or holding the meeting. If you utilize a call or contact center to set appointments, a Web-based approach enables the agents to capture all the information in one call, saving the prospect or customer time and ensuring information captured is consistent.
Web-based scheduling offers the opportunity to improve your access to customer information, which can ultimately drive better decisions. It can differentiate you from your competitors by delivering a more customer-friendly experience. And it easily translates to repeat business by leveraging preferences through a call-to-action that incents the customer to buy again.
Chris Murphy is vice president of sales for TimeTrade Systems (www.timetrade.com).
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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