No matter the size or type of business you own, we can all agree that customer experience is crucial to delivering the value you intend to provide and ultimately growing your business. Setting up appointment bookings for your Shopify store for virtual shopping can be a game-changer to streamline your business.
In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about appointment bookings, including its benefits, how to set one up, and which app we highly recommend for live appointments.
What are appointment bookings?
As the name suggests, this serves as an option for your customers to be able to book and pay for your services in one place (aka your site). This helps you manage your time and inform your availability of the customers.
What are the plus sides of setting up virtual appointment bookings?
Not many Shopify store owners know this, but by simply setting up virtual appointment bookings, they help them:
- Create a unique selling point over competitors
- Better tailor their services to customer needs leading to higher customer satisfaction
- Greater customer retention and entice new customers to try their services
- Simplifying customer management
- Mitigated booking errors
- Generates customer insight to strategize service improvements better
- Creates post-purchase upsell opportunities (e.g., offering a premium service package)
If this sounds great to you, then here’s how you can receive just that.
How to set up your appointment bookings
1. Envision your desired appointment shopping experience
Before getting the ball rolling, you have to know what the goal looks like; that is how the appointment booking experience looks like for your dear customers.
This includes deciding on which fields will be required from your customers, how many days in advance they will need to book an appointment, and what kind of information should be included in the email notification sent after booking an appointment.
We highly recommend gathering with the team to brainstorm and design collaboratively to pinpoint the best-aligned brand experience in every click your customer takes.
2. Find and choose the right appointment booking software
Finding the right appointment booking software can be challenging in the oasis of available options out there, which is why we created a short checklist for you to narrow down your search:
- Ease of integration with your store and POS system and is customer/user-friendly.
- Has features that enable customers to Be notified of their booking schedule, modify their booking, and have your store information (e.g., Contact, location, etc.)
Top Tip: We highly recommend using Servv as your appointment booking software of choice. Aside from enabling easy appointment bookings, they also support hybrid live events & webinars, and recurring meetings (integrable with Zoom and Google calendar).
3. Let others know of the feature’s availability
Communicate the feature’s availability to your shoppers on multiple channels, and ensure the booking is as quick and easy as possible. May it be through your email list, social media accounts, or better yet, both!
4. Ensure your team understands the process inside and out
Knowing and understanding the process from top to bottom is important as the store owner, but so is establishing that same mindset and knowledge for your team. Doing so helps you and your team align your goals and values, which can go a long way to growing your business.
5. Gather customer feedback, analyze, and strategize
A great way to do this is by having a short survey when a customer makes a booking, asking things like: “What’s your favorite product in our store?” or “Rate your visit on a scale of 1-5” or “How can we improve our services for you?” can help you determine the pain points or strengths of your services and improve your way from there.
Set up your appointment bookings with Servv
Servv is a no-brainer app you can use that seamlessly integrates appointment bookings for your Shopify store as well as the everyday apps you use such as Zoom and Google Calendar to ensure you create a first-class booking experience for your customers. Learn more about what Servv can do for your business today!