Using an online scheduler to manage your service appointments has many benefits, like saving advisors’ time and offering customers a convenient alternative to booking appointments by phone. But there are some important points to keep in mind to ensure it’s doing its job and not actually losing you customers. If the process for scheduling an appointment doesn’t cater to your customers’ needs, they are likely to abandon the process altogether, possibly opting for another shop with an easier scheduling process. Recent research suggests the most common reason customers give up while scheduling service online is time selection. Here’s how you can get ahead of this issue and keep your customers happy and your service lane busy.

Updated shop availability is the key to keeping customers engaged

If you’re lucky, your shop is constantly busy, which makes it easy to lose track of the little details, such as remembering to clear space in your service schedule for last-minute cancellations or adding time to the calendar to account for expanded hours.

If your scheduler doesn’t account for and adjust to schedule changes, we highly recommend addressing this issue. According to a recent survey by AutoLoop, we found that 84% of customers prefer to book appointments within a week. So ensuring all available times are correctly displayed is crucial to driving more customer-booked appointments.

For assistance with optimizing your appointment settings in Book^™, please reach out to your Performance Manager.