Benefits of Online Booking

If you're still using a pen and paper to book all your appointments, there are four good reason why you should consider making a New Year's resolution to upgrade to online booking software:

• Online bookings add convenience for you and your clients.
• Mobile bookings can help clients connect with you 24/7.
• Social bookings drive new appointments.
• Online schedule management optimizes your calendar.

Benefit Your Spa and Your Clients

In general, having the ability to take online bookings can relieve you and your staff of time-consuming phone duty, missed appointments and lost revenue. Providing bookings from your website can give you back precious time that you can now spend with your clients.

Online booking systems can also protect your revenue by sending automated appointment reminders and securing bookings with credit card information. This helps reduce no-shows and last-minute cancellations, as well as take upfront deposits for high-ticket services. You can control what services you offer online, which staff can perform them and the dates and times you want to have available. And, with online bookings, you can make slow periods available to boost your bookings and revenue.

Your clients will appreciate the flexibility of being able to book an appointment anytime, anywhere, as well as access their appointment history and recent purchases.

Connect to Your Clients 24/7 

We all spend hours each day on our mobile phones. They've become an indispensable part of how we manage our lives. That's what it's become imperative that you have a mobile presence.

Mobile booking options provide the ultimate convenience for your customers. With a dedicated mobile app, you can stay top-of-mind with your customers between appointments. A mobile app makes it easy for customers to engage with your business and rebook the services they love. You can also use push notifications to send booking reminders and special offers to keep clients coming back.

Drive Appointments on Social Media

For many of us, our Facebook Pages have become the way we keep in touch with family and friends. Why not use that powerful social media engine to drive bookings for your business? Large networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have become effective marketing, booking and sales platforms. Facebook, in particular, has invested in features that make bookings a no-brainer. 

Using your profile page and integrated bookings, new customers can find, research and book an appointment. Another added bonus of social bookings is that it's easy for your followers to point their friends and family directly to your profile page.

Optimize Your Calendar

An online booking software system can ease, simplify and improve the accuracy of your calendar. An online schedule gives your staff 24/7 access so they can see when they're booked, what services they're performing, what rooms they're using and which customers they're seeing. It makes updating, moving or canceling appointments much easier, and reduces scheduling errors such as double-bookings, over-bookings and lost appointments. Having an overall view of your calendar can allow you to see gaps that might benefit from a promotion or special. And it allows you to adjust your staff hours and availability based on booking volume.

Upgrading to online booking software isn't hard, it can reap untold benefits for your business and your clients. 2015 is the year to consider a change!

Tanisha Foster
Director of Vertical Markets
Booker Software