5 Ways Online Appointment Scheduling drives better Customer Relationships

Customers do expect a superb experience when they engage with your business. This holds true not only for the human touchpoints but also for the automated processes that have been set up.

It should be a priority for any business to care about it since any customer would be happily willing to pay more for a product if the company offers an exceptional customer experience. Studies reveal that customer experience will soon outweigh both price and products as the deciding factor when it comes to purchasing, which means that you need to prioritise the customer experience.

While it is important to have customer service as a high-priority it gets difficult to meet the ever-increasing expectations and demands of the customers. The perpetual art lies in balancing between automated and live-agent service solutions. But when it comes to having an easy way to grow customer relationship one needs to think through on what are the best ways of doing it.

Personalisation is the key to meeting customer demands

The magic lies in personalising communication. When the entire FMCG industry took over the world, many buyers lost the human interaction they once valued in the purchasing process. With the further advent of eCommerce, marketers found newer ways to capture the attention of the active online shopper, this led to personalisation being the core strategy to keep the customers happy and connected.

The same philosophy can be used by the customer service teams to ensure that their customer interactions are tailored to their buyers. This leads to two scenarios, the low-touch communications can be automated, while high-value experiences are escalated to the live agents.

The goal is to be able to use technology to minimise the workload of the live agent and to automate the rest.

Online Appointment Scheduling is a boon to customer engagement

Among consumers, a popular tool has been appointment scheduling. Instead of email back and forths, or calling over phone and rescheduling or cancelling, customers are found much happier when they have the luxury to book appointments at their own convenient time over the internet.

While at first sight, it appears that offering online scheduling puts even more distance between the brand and the customers, in reality, the reverse is true. Let us see how.

1. Online Scheduling is Swift and Easy

The old fashioned way to make appointments is archaic and time-consuming. While it does give a friendly human connection while talking to a live service agent, comparing calendars, and doing multiple back and forth makes the entire process much more inefficient.

2. Online Scheduling is a breeze

The relationship of the customer with your business becomes easy when you have given the freedom to make an appointment with you, per their convenience.

3. Empower Customers with Online Scheduling

Making an appointment online makes it easy for them to pick and choose services, along with their preferred calendar slot.

4. Decrease Scheduling Ambiguity

Humans are always susceptible to errors, have you ever confused 1400 hours to 4 PM? No matter how well-trained an employee, there is always a chance of error. While the error is always trivial, the consequences are far-fetched, leading to an annoyed customer and loss of business. If the customers are left with the freedom to book their own appointment, things become much easier, and the potential to erroneous scheduling is reduced.

5. Personalised experience when booking meetings

Online scheduling offers a personalised experience. As we discussed at the beginning of the article, the more personalised the experience the higher the brand loyalty. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, for instance, a user in PDT and another user in Mountain Time Zone would love to see their respective time zone. Storing this contextual information for progressive usage helps in being more personalised to the user and leads to increased brand loyalty.

If the article resonates with you, and you feel the need of an online appointment scheduling software, we have developed Karen from ground up, keeping small businesses in mind, do sign up using your Google Account it’s Free, and we would love to hear from you.

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