Video Transcript:
Something that we find works very well for our clients is having a calendar on the website for booking appointments and site visits. We would recommend for all Landscaping Companies using a calendar on your website to book site visits and phone calls. There’s 4 main types of booking you can use it for:
- Calendar for Initial Phone Calls
- Calendar for Site Visits
- Showroom Calendar
- Calendar for Video Calls
Calendar for Initial Phone Calls
An initial phone call for when someone makes an inquiry to arrange a time to have a proper talk to them on the phone about what they’re looking for rather than always going out to site.
Video consultations seem to work very well in which you set up a zoom call with somebody and talk to them for 20-30 minutes about what they’re looking for and get an idea of whether you can help them, whether they’re realistic in terms of their budgets and everything else to save you the time of going out to visit every single site if you’re not entirely sure if it’s a good one or not.
Having a calendar to book site visits obviously needs to be handled carefully because you could have two in very different locations one after another, but there’s ways around that.
Calendar for Site Visits
I’ve got a couple of examples here, the first is Kneebone Trees who use calendars for site visits. What we’ve done for them is split the areas that they cover into several distinct ones. So, for example, Area 1 – Torbay, Tynebridge and Exeter. People can then book an appointment with them based on those areas. You can see the next date they have available is on the 22nd of October from 7:30am onwards.
What they do is have a day of the week for each location so they’re not rushing around in all different directions. This particular area, Area 1 as they’ve called it, is only available on Tuesdays to be booked. So by the look of things, the next two Tuesdays are full and then it’s free after that.
What they also do is have the booking page hidden from the website, so it’s not available through the menu or anywhere on the site. When someone makes an inquiry and they’re interested in their services, Kneebone will send out an email with a link to this booking calendar so someone can book it in themselves.
So they can say, ‘right, you’re in our area one, we’ll send you a link to that calendar’, or ‘you’re in area two, we’ll send you a link to this calendar’. This means they’ve got a degree of control over it so people can’t just book all over the place and that works well for site visits.
A good thing about phone calls is that you don’t need to worry about location. You can really have them booked anytime you like depending on whether it’s just one person doing the phone calls or there are multiple ones, then you could block off certain days or have all days, all times available.
Weekends are quite a good idea to have available for phone calls, or we would recommend at least having a morning every two or three weeks on a Saturday available for phone calls. Having one or two weekday evenings available does work well too.
With a booking like that, typically you’re looking for someone to book a 10-15 minute initial call so you can talk through what they’re looking for and from your point of view, establish if they’re serious and therefore worth the time and effort of a site visit.
Showroom Calendar
One other calendar I’ve got here is a showroom calendar. So ALS Landscaping up in Lincoln have a very good showroom and we promote it quite heavily on their websites. We’ve got a showroom page here,a video about it, and at the bottom there is a calendar to book a visit to their showroom.
It’s available on Saturday as well because they make sure they’ve got somebody on site on a Saturday morning for showroom visits, and I think they have it late on a Wednesday evening too. This also has the advantage of people coming to you so you don’t have to worry about the location where they’re based and you can schedule them one after another. We’ve found that these types of calendars work well.
Calendar for Video Calls
I’ve not shown an example of a video call but it’s the same kind of thing as with phone calls. You can schedule them one after another because you can sit there and do them in sequence.
It’s really up to you to think about what sorts of calendar booking would work well in your business.
Considerations for Booking Calendars
Whether they are public or hidden
I’ve shown you examples of both here. Public booking calendars are available to see on the website whereas hidden calendars you send someone the link to if you know that you want to go and see them. The danger with having a public calendar for site visits is that people could start booking them and you could be wasting your time going all over the place.
What dates and times are available
If there’s only one person doing these bookings then holidays for example need to be blocked out. As mentioned, trying to have some evenings and occasional weekends available certainly does help. You also want to be sure to block out any future dates you’re not available so people don’t go and book that time
Confirmation and reminder messages
One of the most important things to consider is confirmation and reminder messages. One of the biggest issues we find with our clients are when someone forgets about site visits and isn’t there, particularly when they’re booked a week or two ahead.
With calendar bookings, we try to automate it to some degree. So when somebody books an appointment they get a confirmation email and probably a text message as well to say, ‘we want to confirm your phone call/your site visit for next Tuesday at 4pm’. There’s an internal message to let our client know this visit/phone call has been booked.
Then the day before the customer gets a reminder to let them know it’s tomorrow at 4 o’clock and they get another reminder an hour before, particularly for phone calls. Even the best people in the world will forget things, so rather than risking you making the phone call and having no one on the other end, we find that reminding the day and hour before dramatically increases the number that are there.
Or if they can’t make it they can reply and let you know that something has come up and ask to reschedule and that saves you from wasting your time.
So there’s a few ideas on calendar booking: we find they save time and reduce your wasted time chasing people up. Anything that can be automated in this business is great because then you can focus on the important things such as the actual phone call, the actual site visit, the face to face contact, and the actual work.
I hope that’s useful and if you have any questions get in touch with us.
