When using Nexa to fill your calendar, you’re probably defining a bunch of slots and then leaving plenty of time for technicians or team members to drive between appointments since you have no idea how close together they’ll be when booked. For example, if you’ve got a large territory to cover, an average appointment time of 1 hour and you leave 1 hour of drive time between each appointment, you can fit in maybe 4 or 5 appointments per day.
But what if you’ve got a large team to schedule for and they have different skills or roles? You’ll probably setup a similar calendar and the Nexa agent will have to figure out which slots will work for which types of calls. And when you want to make a change, you’ll have to update Nexa every time. You’ll also have to deal with keeping the calendar updated for PTO, holidays and vacations.
Using Technology to Improve Scheduling & Grow Revenue
A modern scheduling system can keep track of where all your customers, prospects and employees are (and will be). If it has an API, then Nexa can talk to your calendar in real-time and ask it for availability, or even better, good dates and times to suggest to the caller. And if you record time off and holidays in your scheduling system, then Nexa will know about those in real-time, too.
Now imagine that as calls come in, the new appointments get booked geographically closer to existing appointments. This will help reduce your overall drivetime because now the appointments are clustered. You could even setup rules to specify zones in your territory with associated days—so when a call comes in from a client in the Monday zone, they’ll only get Monday availability because that’s the day of the week your technicians or team members are in that part of town.
This approach to scheduling will let you book more sales calls or revenue-generating appointments per day. What would happen to your bottom line if you could consistently fit one more revenue-generating appointment per day? If your average revenue per appointment was $250, that’s a potential increase of $5,000 per month. Or if your average revenue per sales appointment was $1,000 and you could fit in one more sales call per day, that’s a possible increase of $20,000 per month!
The other benefit of a modern scheduling system is the client experience. In addition to expecting someone to answer the phone when they call, customers also expect to get confirmation when the appointment is booked. They’d probably also like a reminder the day before and maybe a text message or a phone call when you’re on the way. Modern scheduling systems can do all of this for you.
Options for Improved Scheduling Software
serviceminder.io is just one example of a scheduling system that can do all these things and it’s compatible with Nexa’s workflow. They answer the phone, book the appointments directly on your serviceminder.io calendar, send confirmations to the customers, notifications to your field staff and reminders based on the client’s preferences. Your schedule is optimized to fit in more revenue-generating and sales appointments, producing more top-line revenue.
Or, you could keep using slots and manually updating your calendar, spending more time at Starbucks because your next appointment is in 45 minutes, even though it was just 15 minutes away from your last appointment. Your call! Learn more about serviceminder.io here.
