Inefficient processes in the business can cost between 20% and 30% in revenue. Can you afford to be missing out on that amount of income?
In this article we’ll look at the ways in which a fully-functioned, high quality online booking system can improve the efficiency of your business, and why such an investment makes sense for the short, medium and long-term success of your brand.
Booking Software Offers a Faster Route to the Point of Sale
We talk a lot about providing outstanding customer experience, and the pathway to profit that it offers.
Customers don’t just want, but they expect, companies to make life easy for them.
A McKinsey survey of 27,000 consumers from 44 different industry sectors showed the potential for businesses who offered quality, low-effort experiences, to increase revenue by 15%.
Online booking software can help you streamline your sales process, making the journey from enquiry to booking a matter of minutes.
You are delivering the low-effort experience your customers want, directing them to the point of sale, on the product they want, as fast as possible. Making the process quick and straightforward – exactly as they want.
Saving Time on Booking Management
Your booking software should be working for you, not the other way around.
A traditional booking process requires a lot of manual effort, which means a lot of time spent managing it.
- Replying to enquiries by email or phone
- Potentially chasing these enquiries up
- Physically taking the booking details from the client
- Taking the payment or sending the invoice
- Logging details into the diary or spreadsheet (or both)
- Sending the confirmation email
- Chasing for additional information
- Compiling booking registers
Every booking can be a hefty accumulation of time; in many cases up to 30 minutes per enquiry. If you are taking 10 bookings per week, that’s 5 hours of your time each week – or MORE THAN 30 DAYS PER YEAR.
How much could your business benefit if you could free this amount of time up?
By investing in the thinkBooker system, for example, these are tasks that are eliminated from the process.
Calling Time on Time Consuming Calls
One of the comments we hear frequently from organisations is that their customers prefer to use the phone to make a booking.
‘We’re old-fashioned’, they might say, or ‘our customers prefer to talk to us more directly’.
Leaving aside the fact that this may not be as true as many businesses think – see above – it is indeed true that there will be certain bookings that require a call, or those customers who still pick up the phone.
The misconception about investing in online booking software is that you are abandoning other pathways for the ‘hands-off’ online journey.
In reality, what you are doing is providing greater choice to capture more customers, and ensuring that all of your booking journeys are working together and all as efficiently as possible.
For instance, thinkBooker has an in-built call manager that means your contact centre staff or booking team can reduce the time spent taking phone bookings, from pre-populated info on returning customers, to easy availability checks, simple to add fields and instant confirmation.
Communication without Compromise
Communication with customers is essential for exceptional service, without doubt.
But does it always have to be manually delivered?
With booking software that marries up all the different journeys (phone, website, face to face etc) you have the ability to automate the essential communication to customers, without it being an unnecessary burden on time.
This can be the confirmation email, automatically sent to the client with all the relevant information for their booking. Additionally, you can automate reminder emails that might be needed for:
- An upcoming booking or appointment
- Essential pre-booking info the client needs to provide (consent form or dietary requirement, for example)
- Outstanding payment.
Not to mention the post-booking emails, such as feedback surveys.
All essential for the customer experience, all of which take a huge amount of time to fulfil when managed manually.
We know that investing in new technology, such as online booking software can be a daunting project. But, get it right and you can feel the benefits within a short period of time, and reap the rewards of a more productive workforce in the long-term.
Investing in powerful, versatile booking software means investing in technology that works for your business, providing the efficient simplicity your customers expect from modern services, while eliminating the swathes of admin that can eat up literally weeks of your working year.
At thinkBooker, we specialise in online booking systems for training courses, classes, activities and events – optimised for efficiency, growth and ongoing client satisfaction.
Browse the site to learn more about course booking systems, sports booking systems, event booking systems and more, or get in touch directly to find out how we can help you.
