How To Integrate Appointment Scheduling Feature In Your Mobile App
App Development
10Feb 2021
Mobile apps have always surprised us with the significant breakthroughs that it has done. You might be surprised by the various on-demand apps with online appointment scheduling as one of their integral features. Simply look at TaskRabbit, Squire, Seamless, and Uber. Booking appointments online has become an excellent feature for health insurance companies like Oscar.
But there are still many private clinics, sports centers, cleaning companies, schools, beauty salons, and other businesses that schedule meetings over call, manually add bookings to Google Calendar, and sign up customers in an Excel file that continually breaks. These procedures are time-taking and mostly lead to errors or losses. Also, by staying offline, businesses are missing out on a huge chunk of cake. Online bookings also enable companies to get a considerable revenue increase and a more steady customer flow.
Letting users book online after business hours can increase revenue by 30-45%, depending on the sector. However, online appointment scheduling is not only one feature. It is a complex solution that:
- It helps you attract & retain users, as they easily find & connect with experts.
- Smoothens the customers, employees, and appointments management.
- It brings more precision allowing for tracking reports & saves businesses plenty of money & time.
That's the reason companies need to automate appointment scheduling. Intricate online appointment scheduling features should become a part of a company's official app or website.
This post is based on our intense experience regarding the services of building online appointment systems. The suggestions you will learn here apply to any business field. Let's first see what your scheduling app should be able to do.
Book Appointments
Enabling customers to book online appointments can bring you more revenue. To make this possible, online bookings should be easy and convenient. Your users must be able to directly interact with your booking service in your app and site by app developers, and your booking app must provide them a list of your services & service providers, even dates & times to select.
To allow your users to view all this information, you will require your custom content management system. It must include details about your services, duration of each service, booking times, images, prices, and descriptions. This booking system should also allocate staff to services.
Some of your users might not have any service providers' choices; thus, it would be a great idea to enable the booking option with any available service provider. Let's look at the service management tools rendered by one of the top appointment scheduling apps; simply book!
Once a user chooses a service, service provider, & time in Simply Book, they can finish the booking, scheduling a recurring or single appointment. To complete the booking, the user needs to input their contact information and add a comment to clarify information if required.
Types Of The Booking Flow
There are 2 basic booking flow types: Guest Bookings & Booking via a user profile.
Guest Bookings: A user inputs their name & an email address or mobile number but does not create a profile. This method compels users to enter their contact information each time they book an appointment.
Bookings Via A User Profile: This type of booking flow can be utilized for signing in to the app, receiving personalized offers & discounts, tracking bonuses, and more. To allow users to create user profiles & register with your service, you can sync with Facebook & Google authentication APIs. You can even offer users simple registration via mobile number or email. Other options include using voice verification APIs or SMS by Twilio, Vonage, or Sinch to validate a user's mobile number.
Appointment Visibility For Users
It would be an excellent idea to enable users to include confirmed bookings to their personal calendars for comfortable event planning from the mobile or web app interface.
Users who do not use calendar apps can provide an option to get SMS appointment reminders. To send an SMS text to your users, you can sync Vonage or Twilio.
Registering For Group Appointments
You can even let various users register for the same appointment if you render services like yoga or math classes, makeup workshops, or fitness training to groups.
Enhancing Your Service & Efficiency
Apart from booking appointments, users should be able to cancel or reschedule appointments. Users should be able to cancel appointments in response to appointment alerts, which lowers the issue of skipped appointments. When a user cancels, another user can book the open slot, and you won't lose money at the end moment.
You must even give users a tool to explain the reason for rescheduling or canceling. Let's take an instance of Healthfully. When a patient has a visit scheduled in Healthfully, they get surveys, particularly for their health state. When a patient fills out an examination, their doctor gets the outcome to prepare for the appointment. This makes an online reservation system an excellent tool for enhancing customer service quality.
You might also require to implement a video call feature to render consultations. The Covid-19 pandemic has raised the demand for touchless interactions, but this newfound demand is possibly to outlast the pandemic.
Manage Appointments
It's a fantastic idea to keep all data about your bookings inside an all-in-one scheduling system. It's way simpler to supervise appointments when a calendar can display pending & scheduled appointments, anticipate the employee's workload, and display when they are available. That is where you will need to determine whether to pick a ready-made cloud-based software solution for handling bookings or a custom cloud calendar.
Ready-made appointment management software vs. developed from the start.
Square Appointments is just one instance of an all-inclusive appointment scheduling calendar for service-based businesses. Using the cloud-based Square Appointments calendar, companies can see all existing & upcoming bookings, verify appointment info, and approve & cancel appointments as required.
If you already use a specific tool for handling bookings and are satisfied with how it functions, consider integrating it and importing all your earlier created bookings to your online scheduling app or portal as a part of online appointment software development.
In general, if you are a small to midsize business, ready-made tools or multi-user calendars for handling bookings may be adequate for your needs. However, if you are a large business, you will likely find the customizability & functionality of such solutions lacking & turn your attention to tailored software development.
Manual Appointment Processing
Ensure your ready-made or tailored appointment calendar platform allows your employees to handle appointments & avoid making errors.
Adding, accepting, & canceling appointments: Allow staff to manually accept & cancel appointments and give reasons for cancellations. The team should manually include new appointments in the system, as people might still register by mobile.
Navigating notifications sent to users: In Square Appointments, handlers can choose among various types of alerts when manually accepting appointments and informing that an appointment is effectively scheduled. They can also include personalized messages to these notifications.
Allocating appointment statuses: To ease appointment management, you can implement appointment statuses for great visibility. Instances of statues are canceled, arrived, no-show, confirmed, and new.
Minimizing human error: Apart from ensuring appointment scheduling flexibility, manual processing boosts the possibility of human mistakes. For our projects, we apply a smart system that assists our customers' employees avoid errors. When there is a new appointment request in the system, responsible staff views an alert until they verify the request. When there are booked appointments within an available time slot, a team cannot remove that time slot till they move the appointments to another time slot.
Build Employee Management
Companies like hair salons have many service providers that clients can choose from. That's why it's essential to have a tool to add, edit, & delete service providers' list.
Simply book enables businesses to create a page for each service provider, including their contact info, name, and pictures. Companies can hide, edit, and remove service provider profiles.
Different employees in your business might have other goals & daily tasks. That's the reason your automated scheduling tool should support different user roles to help staff do their task effectively.
These roles are just instances, and you can build yours with a more or less complicated hierarchy.
- Admin: complete access to all services, service providers, customers, schedules, tariffs, payments, management sections, and settings.
- Senior Staff: access to all service providers, customers, & schedules.
- Staff: access to the user's schedule & customers.
- Viewer: access to see some schedules and user information or any other limited info.
Another good idea for businesses with various employees is to sync with an HCM (Human Capital Management) system like BambooHR. An HCM system will display your staff's workload and help you correctly distribute time slots between workers when some are on vacation or sick leave.
For example, your hairdresser Sara takes 3 weeks off to visit her family. Your HCM system notifies you & your staff that Sara is going on a vacation so that you can inform her clients and allocate them to other hairdressers.
Another instance of how you can use an HCM system is to track your staff's work time. Suppose you own a cleaning company and all your employees have to check in with an e-badge when they get to work. Your HCM system will inform you if a staff member is late so that you can contact your clients and let them either choose another staff or wait.
Manage Users
Every company wants constant and long-term clients. To preserve them, service providers need a robust tool to find, register, & contact users, inform them of new services and use contact details for marketing reasons. All that can be done with the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that renders info about your users, their purchase history, and notes from staff.
One option is to develop your CRM system with custom fields, which might take some time. Another option is to sync advanced CRM solutions like Salesforce, PipeDrive, or HubSpot to better engage with users and know the actual no. of sales accounting for cancellations and no-shows.
You can even add users to your system manually or import user information from a current Excel file or Google Sheet document.
With all this info, you can easily nurture your users with customized emails, inviting them to a unique workshops with a special discount, for instance. And for marketing reasons, you will definitely appreciate integrations with:
- User engagement services such as ReferralCandy to hold referral campaigns.
- Email services such as MailChimp to send email campaigns.
- Social media networks such as Instagram & Facebook to book visits and market.
Receive Payments
You can approve online payments by syncing with PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, or Square. Discover more about syncing a payment gateway in your mobile or web app in our detailed guide.
Remember that there might be different payment situations for each service you render:
- Full payment in advance or a deposit for services that are frequently canceled at the end moment, such as Spanish classes & other tutoring types.
- Pay later for services such as nursing or cleaning that are not often canceled.
- Payment with bonuses and promo codes for recurring appointments such as yoga classes and fitness training.
- Tipping for services like taxi rides & hairdressing.
To settle these payment options, you will need to build a custom tool to select the payment processor, allocate the payment to a service, choose the price, and enable promo codes.
You must even think of cases when an appointment is scheduled and paid for but canceled before it occurs. In this scenario, consider ways to refund the client. The top players in the online appointment scheduling market do not render automatic refund features, as the % of canceled yet paid bookings is very low.
But when an appointment that was already paid for doesn't get canceled, solutions such as Acuity Scheduling send you an automated email with information on the canceled booking & payment. Knowing when & how the payment was made, you can refund the customer manually.
However, online payments are just the tip of the iceberg since many businesses receive funds offline when users check out via a cash desk. Thus, companies need a point of sale. Square provides its tool for offline user checkout, enabling you to charge a user for services and add additional services or discounts in the same payment.
You can even think of custom software development to develop a tool to render users with service gift cards, subscriptions, bundles, gift certificates, discounts, and special offers. Think of a Simply Book app that allows you to tailor gift cards, name them, pick a service, & choose the currency to pay with.
Assess Business Performance
To know how well your business is performing, you will indeed require analytics tools that render you with information on:
- Total bookings
- No. of booked, rescheduled, and canceled appointments by service & service provider
- Payments by service & service provider
If you send promo materials to users through SMS or emails, you might even consider a report on SMS & email campaigns' outcomes.
In most cases, web apps for appointment scheduling come with their custom analytics tools & dashboards that are easier to use than Google Analytics, which is somewhat tough to set up.
How Can You Lower No-shows & Cancellations?
When you let users book online, there is always a risk that they will book an appointment but not show up. As per Health Management Tech, the healthcare domain itself loses $150 billion a year to no-shows. This figure may differ for different sectors, but no-shows remain a vast revenue drain.
Create a cancellation policy: For now, the best way to reduce the no-show rate is to build the right cancellation policy, and users need to agree with it while scheduling. For instance, you can limit the time to cancel a booking or charge a deposit that isn't refunded if the appointment is canceled.
Provide to add a user to the waitlist: Waitlisting can help you fill in other people when there are no-shows, enabling another user to fill an appointment if somebody who actually booked doesn't come on time.
Render subscription or package deals: One more option is to switch to subscription or package deals after 1 or 2 appointments. Simply book has a special integration to infuse a cancelation policy in a service provider's website, so you might think of using it.
Exclusive Useful Tips
With the following tips & hints, you can develop an online scheduling solution that matches your business requirements.
Don't Reinvent The Wheel. Refurbish It!
Several ready-made appointment scheduling products are available. Learn their benefits to adopt them and also enhance them. And try to recognize cons to avoid.
While building an appointment scheduling app for a US clinic group, we studied many solutions earlier used by the client. Henceforth, a software company developed a product with simple user onboarding thanks to a familiar user flow. But unlike the solutions where all filters are concealed under confusing buttons, we lowered the number of filtering options and made filters noticeable right in the calendar.
Ensure Flexibility, Scalability & Usability From The Very Beginning
Consider software systems you want your appointment scheduling solutions to sync with. Ensure you establish a software architecture that supports these integrations & enables them to add or enhance functionality as your company expands.
The microservices architecture we develop for our booking products ensures that all services can be decomposed and scaled within the API service's bounds. You can render superb usability via easy-to-navigate bulk filtering, editing, and pre-crowded forms.
Keep In Mind Security Issues
To render maximum cybersecurity when exchanging data, begin with examining risks your business might face. Standard practices used by experienced tech providers to make sure great security for booking software are:
- Data encryption
- Activity logging
- Setting session expiration times
- Restricting the no. of devices logged in to one account simultaneously
- Adhering to industry-specific regulations (e.g. HIPAA for healthcare organizations & GLBA for financial institutions)
Despite the various ready-made booking software, our customers often experience difficulties personalizing this software to their requirements. Furthermore, onboarding staff to appointment scheduling platforms is often a tedious & challenging process.
Hopefully, this blog has helped you find out how to make appointment scheduling functions. If you wish to assign this task to an experienced scheduling system development provider, we are happy to help you add a booking feature to your mobile app.
Harnil Oza is the CEO & Founder of Hyperlink InfoSystem. With a passion for technology and an immaculate drive for entrepreneurship, Harnil has propelled Hyperlink InfoSystem to become a global pioneer in the world of innovative IT solutions. His exceptional leadership has inspired a multiverse of tech enthusiasts and also enabled thriving business expansion. His vision has helped the company achieve widespread respect for its remarkable track record of delivering beautifully constructed mobile apps, websites, and other products using every emerging technology. Outside his duties at Hyperlink InfoSystem, Harnil has earned a reputation for his conceptual leadership and initiatives in the tech industry. He is driven to impart expertise and insights to the forthcoming cohort of tech innovators. Harnil continues to champion growth, quality, and client satisfaction by fostering innovation and collaboration.
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