Online booking systems the sleeping giant for SMEs

Okay I was wrong.

Unlike Fonzie in a famous episode of 70s sitcom Happy Days, I can get my mouth – or at least my fingers, around that often challenging admission.

You see about six years ago I wrongly predicted a boom in what was then the latest piece of online wizardry – Online Booking Systems.

As the name suggests, Online Booking Systems are systems which allow website visitors to peruse available bookings in real time and immediately place a booking. If you like they can even take a full or part payment.

They shouldn’t be confused with ‘booking requests’ which simply allow visitors to indicate potential booking times.

Online Booking Systems go the full nine yards by confirming the booking and taking payments in real time.

My thinking at the time was that because technology, which once cost service providers well into five figures, became duplicable and therefore commoditised, it would make the online booking capabilities of large airlines and hotels within financial reach of the smallest B&B.

How far within reach?

How about well under $100 a month for a comprehensive rented solution?

And the number of businesses who can take advantage of Online Booking Systems are enormous. Basically anyone who is selling time instead of physical products – from doctors and dermatologists to hotels and hairdressers.

In case you aren’t aware of the wonder that is the Online Booking System, here’s a quick summary.

Online Booking Systems have four major benefits:

• Booking (ie. making money) while you sleep
• Closing sales
• Improving cashflow
• Drastically improving productivity

Booking (and making money) while you sleep

One of the biggest financial challenges for the service provider is the cost of taking bookings. Some providers pay through the nose for someone to attend the phone to do it in person, while others have to find time during the day to return calls left on answering services. Either way it’s a time and cost impost they can do without.

Online booking systems allow clients to book themselves an appointment in their own time – whether that be 3pm or 3am.

Imagine being able to log into a completely self-maintained log of bookings whenever you needed to. And imagine the savings versus the alternatives.

Closing sales

This may come as a surprise but these days there are literally hundreds of distractions that will prevent clients making a booking with you.

And most of these occur when they are not able to complete the booking within a single communication.

We’ve all been through it. One minute you’re on the phone to make an appointment, the next you are off picking up the kids or getting dinner ready or whatever other crises confronts you in your day-to-day life.

Weeks later you realise that you never did get back in touch with that service provider after all. Meaning lost business for them!

An Online Booking System seals the deal in just one round of communication. Allowing the client to get on with the rest of their day and the provider to secure the booking and even payment up front.

Improving cashflow

Yes, most clients are quite willing to pay for their booking – or at least a large proportion of it, in advance.

Because again it is one less transaction they have to deal with later. Booking made, confirmed and paid for all in one sitting. What could be better than that?

Drastically improving productivity

As all of the above indicates, any booking which isn’t settled in one transaction duplicates the time and cost of handling the booking, meaning reduced profits with every additional multiple-handling.

But takeup is negligible

So with all of these fairly convincing reasons for implementing online booking, you would think that pretty much every service provider would be falling over themselves to get hold of the technology.

Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

A quick survey of one professional service provider starkly illustrates this.

While writing this blog, I conducted a simple Google search for ‘physiotherapists in Sydney’. Of all physiotherapy practices whose websites did well, to come in the first 10 results, not a single practice offered real-time booking.

The news was better with the next best thing, a booking request form, with six out of the 10 offering that capability. At least this capability improves the chances of a booking because it takes only one piece of correspondence to confirm it.

The remaining four offered no appointment booking capability whatsoever. These providers run the greatest risk of losing the booking altogether because they are relying on visitors to either contact them via phone or email when of course they may choose to do neither.

A Melbourne-based system provider, Craig Dixon of BookitLive, confirmed this poor general takeup of Online Booking Systems.

“Yes the takeup is a little slower than we would like although the customers that have taken the system on will never go back, he said. “The savings in time and money have been quite significant.”

“Let’s remember nobody wanted to take up internet banking either but now everybody does it. We are very confident that this is the future and we have seen a significant increase in interest even in the last quarter.”

So why the reluctance?

I have to confess that given the amazing benefits Online Booking Systems can provide their operators, I’ve been very surprised with the slow takeup.

As is Craig Dixon.

“The reluctance appears to centre around losing control but I think the market will realise that the benefits far outweigh any loss of control.”

I too have been offering the technology via my firm for some years and have been able to convince few operators of its merits.

One of the most common responses is the perceived lack of a human interface – ‘Oh we prefer the personal touch of phone communication’.

As pointed out in this blog previously, this perception is nothing but a myth.

Online booking now commonplace

Consumers are now more prepared to book online without a personal interface as the success of online air travel bookings indicates. Some airlines report more than 70% of their bookings are now done online.

Of course big incentives like online booking discounts help this along, but there’s no reason why other service providers can’t reward online booking adopters by following suit.

And of course as web-savvy Gen Ys come into more money, they will positively ignore any business that doesn’t provide full online transaction capabilities.

So how much business are you losing by not allowing your customers to book online?

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Craig Reardon is a leading eBusiness educator and founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which provide the gamut of ‘pre-built’ website solutions, technologies and services to SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.