Regardless of social status, the consumer experience is steadily morphing into personalization and one-to-one interaction. And as the world continues to open up, our digitally enhanced economy is including an appointment-oriented strategy to improve customer engagement. This fast-rising service stimulated by COVID-19 social distancing practices is an innovative way to drive business growth and create a seamless experience between your brick and mortar store and digital platform.
The Appointment Economy
While we are slowly moving towards the post-pandemic world, many businesses are likely to adopt a growth model centered on adapting to new customer behavior and embracing the future of customer relations. This growth model includes the adoption of appointment scheduling, an approach encouraged by restaurants and high-end retailers as a way to offer an exclusive experience to those willing to pay a premium price. Now it is speedily coming to every business at every price point.
The previous year witnessed businesses spend a significant part of the year reacting, adapting, digitizing, and putting infrastructures to help outlast the pandemic. As the market trends shift towards digital interactions, we are likely to experience businesses move to a largely appointment-based economy to follow social distancing mandates. The best way for business owners to provide a cohesive in-branch experience is by implementing an omnichannel appointment scheduling solution. So instead of walking into a clothing store, customers will schedule appointments to meet with a personal shopper who will usher them around the store filled with only a handful of other shoppers. Dine-in options at fast-casual restaurants will require reservations with limited availability. Appointment technology allows businesses to predict and manage customer flow and serve people more quickly.
Some of the Benefits of Appointment Technology include:
Appointments let businesses prepare the right stock. This approach is even more powerful when applied across multiple branches in real-time, allowing you not only to set appointments but allowing your establishment to optimize resources.
Appointments technology allows customer data capturing and relationship building digitally. These customer engagements can come from pop-up ads, events reminders, offers, and even personalized service that ties offline behavior to online shopping profiles. (Read Omnichannel retailing).
While customers are catching on because of the widespread adoption of the appointment model, this is an opportunity for your business to offer relationship-based services, where customers start and finish appointments with one individual.
The Customer Experience Has Evolved
As the world continues to open up, customers are not giving up the convenient, controlled, and enhanced digital experiences they are accustomed to already. In the emerged economy, time and experiences are everything. Businesses must increasingly differentiate themselves through the personalized service that they deliver. Appointment scheduling represents an opportunity for business owners/managers to be more thoughtful about on-premise service, plan more effectively, use resources more efficiently, and aim for a higher quality of in-person services. Doing so values the customer’s time and presence to deliver outcomes that benefit everyone.
The key to achieving this is to deliver the right experiences at the right time, in the most personalized manner, by utilizing technologies tailored to get you the desired customer engagement and outcomes. To achieve this, you must;
Our expectations when it comes to service delivery have evolved. Consistent upgrades to the experience are here to stay. Personalized conveniences are among those critical experiences customers will be expecting more of in years to come.
The Hiopos Software is a Complete Point of sales solution for beauty, retail, and hospitality establishment that enables customers to schedule appointments, allows you to assign appointments to specific staff, and send reminders as at when due. Our software solutions provide your business with efficiency and growth through multiple touchpoints by providing you access to real-time data and analytics. Be that company that brings value to every customer engagement seamlessly. Contact us today at pos@posshop-ng.com.