Scheduling appointments from your website should not be time-consuming. It should be made simple, fast, and, importantly, automated. And the booking experience that you provide on your website matters.
If you're currently booking appointments manually, then the number of back-and-forth conversations with your clients could be hindering your daily operations. It can take three messages with client A, seven messages with client B, and even weeks with client C. You get the gist.
If it's done through a call, then checking your schedule, negotiating a different time, confirming the appointment, and sending a confirmation email or a calendar invite takes a lot of effort. Your appointment data may also be scattered all over the place, which is a hassle. A lot of time is spent on scheduling rather than focusing on critical areas of your business.
Using an online booking system to collect appointments
Online booking systems work perfectly to bridge this time gap and automate other important tasks around your appointments. Clients can ideally self-schedule their appointments based on your available time slots through a booking page or widget.
Online booking systems also help automate other scheduling tasks like:
- Sending appointment-related notifications via email or SMS to your clients
- Collecting payments upfront for your appointments
- Creating meeting links for appointments through video conferencing integrations
- Sharing calendar invites for booked appointments with your clients
- Checking your connected calendar to avoid double-bookings
- Collecting more information from clients through a booking form
- Creating booking rules to get booked based on your preferences
- Managing your team and assigning them to various event types
- Generating appointment and revenue-related reports from your dashboard
- And much more!
With a booking system in place, you can not only collect appointments swiftly but also save valuable time for your business. This makes a convincing case for you to add a booking widget on your website to automate your appointment bookings.
Manually scheduling appointments on your website
Many businesses still follow the traditional approaches of allowing clients to either contact them or schedule appointments on their website.
The challenge, however, is that these traditional approaches often result in significant delays in interacting with clients. If we think about it, we burden the client with making them take the effort to drop an email with their requirements or to contact you over a call. Contact forms, on the other hand, come with a different challenge of having to respond to clients in time.
As a result, your business has to handle the delay that is caused, and the poor booking experience that your clients receive on your website becomes an obstacle to booking more appointments.
Adding an online booking system to your website
An online booking system like Zoho Bookings offers multiple ways to add your booking page to your website.
A booking page is an external page that can be shared with your clients to collect appointments. The page displays the various appointments you offer and their respective time slots for clients to choose and book.
With Zoho Bookings, you can also completely personalize the look and feel of the booking pages to match your branding. Change the colors and themes, add your logo and background images, and more.
Once you've set up your booking system, you can leverage it on your website to let your clients self-schedule appointments directly.
Here are four ways to add a booking system to your website:
1. Hyperlink the booking page URL
You create a "Book now" or "Schedule an appointment" button that can be placed on any of your webpages. Upon clicking the button, the booking page opens for clients to schedule appointments.
2. Add a booking widget
Online booking systems like Zoho Bookings offer HTML or iframe code that can be simply inserted into your website editor. The booking page is then directly visible on the webpage, where you add the widget for clients to book from.
3. Website pop-ups
By leveraging your website's iframe code, you can show your booking pages as a pop-up on your website when customers land on it. You can also custom code the pop-up to appear either immediately or after a certain duration through your website editor.
4. Include a booking link in your web chat
If you've added a chatbot for your website, you can include the booking pages to be shared with clients for specific workflows. For example, when someone inquires about a demo or service, you can add relevant booking links in the response template to instantly share it with clients.
By using Zoho SalesIQ as your website chatbot, you can allow your clients to schedule appointments directly through the chat window. Configure a preset messaging workflow that shares the booking slots when required, or have your live agents share the booking slots with clients at any point during the interactions through the chat tab.
One advantage of using an online booking system is the variety of booking page links you can use for your website.
- Business booking page displays all the appointments across locations and departments created for your businesses.
- Staff booking pages display only the appointments offered by a particular staff member.
- Individual appointment booking pages display only the time slots of one particular appointment type you've created.
- Workspace (location/team) booking pages display all the appointments offered in a particular location or department.
Depending on your business's nature and website structure, you can strategically place these booking pages to collect more appointments from your website visitors.
1) Unburdens you from manual tasks
When a booking system is added to your website, you're basically setting yourself free from tasks that eat away your time. Your booking system collects appointments right from your website and handles all other tasks related to your appointments.
2) Increased appointments
Before implementing a booking system, your business can typically only schedule appointments during your working hours. Whenever you're done for the day, you'll only be back the next day, spending a few hours responding to your appointment inquiries. However, after adding a booking system to your website, you’re potentially allowing your business to schedule appointments around the clock.
3) Enhanced booking experience
Scheduling an appointment directly on your website is a more convenient option for your clients than emailing or filling out a contact form. You can also reach interested clients who are coming across your business for the first time and enable them to book with you in no time.
4) Centralized data management
Having a booking system for your business helps you manage all your appointment-related data under a single roof instead of opening multiple applications. You can store customer information, view their appointment history, view appointment-related details, manage your staff appointments, and generate reports when needed. You can also move relevant data to your other business apps and get actionable insights for your business.
5) Effortless team management
With a booking system, you can easily route new bookings from your website to your team without having to coordinate by email or other forms of messaging. Simply assign your team members to the appointments you set up and let them automatically get booked in a round-robin manner.
6) Time zone conversion
If your business collects appointments worldwide, a booking system helps avoid time zone confusion by automatically converting your available time zones based on your clients' locations. This simple yet important functionality saves time and enhances the booking experience for your clients on your website.
Make your website appointment-ready!
If you're still relying on manual methods to collect appointments from your website, it's about time you optimize it by adding a booking system in there. Your business and your clients deserve a simpler way to schedule appointments, and you can get started with a 15-day free trial of Zoho Bookings today!
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