So you’ve heard it everywhere – you should switch to cloud booking management software, they all say. Your competitors probably have, and if they haven’t, then you’ll be the first to get ahead of the game. So what’s the big deal about cloud booking software? Why is it such a game-changer versus the conventional ‘pen and paper’ diary model? What benefits does it offer for marketing, ease of use, and clientele management? In this blog article, let’s take a look into the similarities and differences between traditional booking methods and cloud booking software, to find out where SaaS jumps ahead.
Cloud booking gives you better insight into your customers
In comparison to cloud booking software, conventional diary methods take very little valuable customer info when recording an appointment or purchase. Without technology, you can’t use algorithms to target products to specific customers and clients, and you can’t analyse data to find out what they’re most interested in and what they’re likely to buy next. Of course, you can write down as much as you like about the interests they’ve spoken to you, and what you think they’d want to purchase from you, but this really doesn’t compare to the outstanding data you can collect from using cloud booking software.
Any good salesperson knows that understanding your client’s wants, needs and priorities is extremely important to finding them the right product or solution, and swiftly persuading them to make a purchase. With a traditional booking diary, it can be difficult to stay on top of these ever so important factors. With cloud booking, however, you can keep a clean record of each customer’s buying history, understand their priorities and purchasing habits, and target products and services far more successfully.
So in short, the analytics and insights gleaned from online software can help you drastically boost your revenue and increase your selling success.
Cloud booking keeps your customers happy
Modern business is dependent on building good, strong and foundational relationships with your customers and clients, and maintaining an extremely high standard of buying experience. This keeps them coming back time and time again and ensures your customers only spread positive, glowing words about your products or services.
With cloud booking, you can double down on improving the buying experience for your customers and clients, by creating a streamlined booking page and utilising cloud software features to find the perfect solutions for your buyers. For example, this might be finding the perfect time slot for an appointment and giving them the ability to check whether the appointment is still going ahead. It could be allowing them to see who will serve them on that particular day, or how busy any given day is in store so that they can choose the perfect time for them.
Although these may seem like small factors, they’re hugely important in building a brilliant customer experience, which helps boost retention and improve your company’s reputation. Cloud booking software offers a lot more use cases than traditional methods. Which means that…
Cloud booking software is more versatile
As mentioned, cloud booking software offers a much wider range of use cases and flexibility for various business models than traditional pen and paper diaries. You can customise the online software to fit to your needs and streamline your booking workflow. As well as providing your normal appointments or services, you can improvise and increase your revenue by opening new services which would have been too complicated or difficult to manage through a paper diary.
Because cloud booking software is so flexible and reliable, you can innovate in your field and provide new and exciting services without any overhauls to your business model. This reduces time and resource expenses and helps you market new services to your customers and clients in a more presentable and respectable fashion. It also makes it more easy to track! That last point also ties into this….
You can track clients and make changes faster!
No one likes having to scribble out something in a booking diary and find space to write in new details. Cancelled appointments are not only damaging to your reputation and revenue, but they confuse your booking history and mean you have to spend more time reorganising your diary. That’s not good enough.
Cloud booking software converges all your client data and buying history/analytics into organised spaces, where you can make changes which are automatically applied and saved to the cloud. This means you can tick off, cancel or update orders and records without wasting time, and get back to doing exactly what you love – providing a damn good service to your customers!
