Organizing and streamlining your maintenance and installations appointments is key to running a successful garage door business. Streamlining not only allows you to be prepared for future appointments, but it also helps you be more efficient, which in turn makes the experience for you and your customer better.
Here are GarageWorks’ Tips to make sure you are taking full advantage of your day, without being overbooked and overwhelmed:
- Make Scheduling Easy: Implement an online system that can schedule appointments for you. This makes it easy on the customer and you. You can quickly pull up your schedule for the day, and the customer will not have to jump through any hoops to make an appointment. Make sure to set aside some time during the day to follow up on appointments, calls as well as emails.
- Preventative Maintenance: When you visit a customer for a work request, make sure they understand all the benefits your company has to offer. If you make regular preventative maintenance calls throughout the year, at the first appointment is a great time to get all their appointments scheduled. To help with these requests, purchase a digital device or ensure your scheduling software has an app so you can book these appointments on hand, in real time.
- Reminders: Make sure to send an appointment confirmation email out after a customer has booked an appointment with you. This will keep your appointment top-of-mind. If an appointment is scheduled far in advance, send a reminder email just in case they forgot about the scheduled appointment! Reminder emails are great to send 3-5 days before the appointment. In these emails, make sure you let your customers know what you will be doing and what you will need (access to the garage, driveway, payment, etc.).
- Policies: Even though reminder emails and calls help decrease cancellations and no-shows, make sure you have a policy in place that helps the customer understand your guidelines. After all, a cancellation could mean that you might have lost business elsewhere!
- Timing: Make sure you have plenty of time to get through all your customer appointments for the day – don’t overbook. This includes scheduling some downtime for you or your employees (lunch breaks, etc.) and emergency calls. After all, you don’t want to set a bad first impression for any of your customers by showing up late.
These are just a few GarageWorks Tips to help you stay organized and keep your business running smoothly. There are many project management tools that you can use on your desktop and/or mobile device that could make your life even easier. Some of our top appointment scheduling tools include FlexBooker, TimeTap, MyAppointments and Timely. For more information on these tools, and to see other options, check out this site.
