5 Needs Your Appointment Scheduling Solution Should Address

Scheduling and managing appointments are vital to customer experience and the business’s overall success. When choosing an appointment scheduling and management tool for your organization, there are several factors to consider. Are you able to customize your booking forms to guarantee your leads are qualified for service? Can you access reports that help you gauge how your business is performing?

Using a comprehensive scheduling tool like TimeTap, the entire scheduling process becomes seamless for your staff and clients. Our powerful feature list covers scheduling necessities that other solutions you may have tried don’t offer — including a built-in CRM that’s easy to use, as well as automated scheduling features. Here are five needs that your scheduling solution should address in order to give you the best value.

1. Provides customizable customer information form

The first step to scheduling an appointment is arguably the most important. Gathering the correct information from clients and prospects is essential to successful appointment booking. Therefore, your forms must be created with that goal in mind. If you teach an advanced programming class, custom booking forms can be used to ask prospective students if they’ve completed a prerequisite boot camp. Medical providers can use this feature to make a thorough intake form with screening questions. You can even add a personal touch by setting your own thank you messages to show when clients submit their forms.

With TimeTap, you can customize forms and add additional fields for collecting information from those who are scheduling an appointment with you. The collected information can be saved in a client profile for building a customer database. With our API, you can have client information automatically added to a CRM or third-party applications.

Manage your forms easily

What if you need your clients to sign a disclaimer while scheduling their appointment? Instead of sending a separate form or taking the time to do it in person, our software gives you the option to add a disclaimer in the description section of your form.

Implement variable descriptions

Custom forms are also a great way to follow up with a client after the initial appointment. Using our variable descriptions feature, you have the ability to send clients even more information regarding their appointment. Provide them with a summary of their visit, a questionnaire, or a plan detailing next steps. For example, if you have a personal training service and your client’s first appointment was a fitness assessment, you can send them the workout plan you think is best for their situation.

2. Offers client management tools

Digital record keeping is supposed to be more efficient and secure than the old-fashioned way. Spreadsheets and other simple methods of client databases aren’t sustainable for growing businesses. Still, organizations find that some modern scheduling tools overcomplicate or neglect client management. Clients and their data shouldn’t have to interact with a myriad of technologies when scheduling appointments. TimeTap houses client information in one central location, the Client Menu. This menu gives you full access to everything you need for your clients.

Client profiles

When someone books an appointment with you, they are automatically given a client profile. By automating this process, our tool reduces time and money spent on administrative duties. You can manually update information or add notes in the profile. Additionally, any future communication or appointments scheduled are recorded in the client information. This gives you a more comprehensive database on client history. You can even add labels to categorize and sort your clients.

Payments and invoices

Keeping track of client payments can be a big job, but our tool simplifies it by including all client payments in their profile. On a company-wide scale, viewing every payment can be a little daunting. Our reporting tool helps simplify insights into payments. You can even run reports to view outstanding fees or other payment-related information on customers.

3. Allows for customized scheduling flow

Making an appointment with your company should be a simple process. If you choose TimeTap for your scheduling tool, you will be able to choose between several scheduling flows for your clients. You need a tool that can fit your complex scheduling requirements.

Say your business has multiple locations, staff and services that they offer. Like most businesses, some staff might only work at specific locations or perhaps some staff offer different services than other staff. You need a scheduling tool that can sort the complexity for you and make it easy for customers to book appointments without the hassle.

With our customized scheduling flow, you can prioritize the selections that are most important before drilling down further. So, if locations are far apart, you could make that option the first selection and then present the options for specific services and staff members. Customize the schedule any way you like to meet your business needs.

4. Automatically generates customized messaging

You may be noticing a trend – the ability to customize. That’s because the ability to tailor your scheduling solution to your organization’s specific needs makes your clients’ experience remarkably smooth. Whether you need to send an annual appointment reminder, confirmations or schedule send a follow-up email, you can automate them all with our software. You can even customize a cancellation message. That way, if you feel sick or need to suddenly cancel an appointment, a quick click of a mouse will update your calendar and automatically generate cancellation emails to your customers.

Reminder notifications

Life gets busy, and even with calendar apps it can be hard for some people to remember their appointments. Your scheduling software should automatically notify clients ahead of time.

You can set reminder notifications at the time and intervals you deem best for your clients. You can select text and email options for generating these messages. Our software even gives you the option to have reminders generated to TimeTap staff members as well - just to make sure both parties are aware of the upcoming appointment.

Recall campaigns

As soon as the first visit is scheduled, business owners are normally thinking about how to get clients in for a second appointment. This is important because many customers don’t keep track of their need for scheduling appointments. A simple reminder email to schedule, say an annual checkup, is a perfect way to keep your customers engaged and returning to your business.

With our recall campaign feature, you can generate automatic reminders for clients to schedule appointments. You can set a specific time since their last appointment for these reminders to generate. When you set up a recall campaign, you’re speaking directly to your clients and suggesting when their next appointment should be. This makes the chance of a follow-up appointment much higher.

Recall campaigns can be used for just about any business. Tattoo artists and piercers can use them to send out reminder emails to clients who recently got serviced and need a check-up to monitor their healing process. Accountants may send out periodic emails during tax season encouraging past clients to get started on their tax return. Though the uses may be different, the goal is the same - bring clients back for another appointment.

5. Provides detailed reporting features

Being able to see a grand view of your business scheduling is helpful for keeping a pulse on future sales. With our reporting features, we can help you build custom reports to see a variety of data. Additionally, you can create reports to see the number of total booked appointments across the entire business or for a particular department or staff member.

Need to monitor the number of sales collected? Our reports can give you that same visibility. In the event your current tool doesn’t have adequate reporting, consider replacing it with TimeTap.

TimeTap has a robust feature list that eliminates all friction with scheduling. Our intuitive scheduling solution grants you complete control of client booking, and supports personalization and 3rd party app integrations. Simplify your booking process and thoroughly automate it without having to learn complicated software or deal with more than one solution.

Interested in using TimeTap for your scheduling tool?