Using Microsoft Bookings one can go beyond conventional appointment scheduling and actively engage with their customers. This will help Bookings users have better relationships with their customers, have higher trust, and ultimately higher and faster conversions.
Microsoft Bookings features, like reminders and post appointment email follow ups, allow you to actively engage with customers. You can reduce the chance of your customers missing an appointment, be better informed about their appointment, and increase the probability of another appointment. Let’s see how you can achieve all of these.
A simple reminder to not miss an appointment.
Let’s start with the basics. Configuring a reminder is a great way of ensuring that you avoid no shows. Email reminders can be configured under the notification section of services. They can be sent to customers as well as staff members. A reminder can be configured to be sent sometime before a scheduled appointment.
The message of the reminder can be added by the admin of the Bookings calendar. Here, rather than just reminding the customer about the appointment, you can add information which may be relevant to the customer. Some examples are given below:
- Suppose a patient has scheduled an appointment with a doctor. In the reminder one can ask the patient to carry the previous test results and insurance documents.
- If a student has scheduled an appointment with a professor for project discussions. The professor may want to remind students to carry their previous project files.
A post appointment email follow-up to book another appointment.
Often the situation demands that customers book another appointment after the first one. This can be the case for a medical consultation, a sales call, or an online class. It is very easy to configure a email follow up for your service. Email follow ups are also present under the notification section of services.
A follow up email asking users to give feedback or fill a survey.
To achieve this, we can use another Microsoft 365 product, Microsoft Forms. One can configure a form to take a survey and paste the link of the form in the follow up email. The Bookings and Forms admin can go to Microsoft Forms and analyze the data. A feedback form can also help admins gauge the performance of staff members.
Follow up email educating customers about your other services and offerings.
Follow up emails is also a nice place to educate the customers about your other services and offerings. One can share them a link to the company’s latest updates page or a link to blogs and news articles.
Just a "Thank you" note!
You can also just send out a thank you note to the customer after the appointment. The customer will feel good and will have a better recall value of the services provided by you.