Photo by Nicola Styles

 

Online scheduling software has become increasingly popular for financial institutions and consumers alike, driven most recently by the COVID-19 pandemic.

These user-friendly platforms are allowing greater efficiency in day to day business activity. They increase customer happiness with features like self-serve booking and automated reminder messages.

An appointment planner app works with your business to streamline scheduling, but that’s not all. Did you know that it can actually provide you with powerful insights? These apps have the ability to gather valuable information. They notice patterns and help you identify your strengths and weaknesses.

Want to get the most out of your appointment planner and boost revenue? Follow along to learn which measurements to watch for and how to use them to improve your business.

How Do Analytics Work?

Remember when businesses operated with paper scheduling and pencils? Cancelations were messy and rescheduling was a task and a half. That system became obsolete because of its inability to scale and grow, but there was also a key factor that business owners were missing.

Scheduling software improves your daily appointment planner. It makes schedules more readily available, but it isn’t only for managing your appointments. Every activity that takes place on a planner app is logged and remembered. Financial institutions can gather more information, building out a history of past engagements.

Businesses are no longer scribbling down a name or erasing contact information when they move clients around. Any movement is tracked and filed for future reference at the click of a button.

So where are each of these analytics and what do the numbers teach you?

These analytics break down into separate categories. You can see which clients used an online booking system to schedule their appointment and who booked through your staff.

Online Booking Analytics

Online booking insights will help you identify who is finding this service helpful and how they are using it. This can be incredibly powerful for growing your share of wallet and automating your approach.

Online Booking Percentage

This insight will tell you how many of your total appointments come from your self-serve booking platform.

This platform will allow users to access your team schedule and select a time (and method, phone, video or in-person) that is convenient for them. A large benefit to this service is that they can log in whenever it suits them. Even if your business is closed, they can still interact with you. This also saves on staff productivity as they are spending less time on the phone taking appointments.

Measuring what percentage of appointments come from this source will give you an idea of its productivity. If this is a new addition to your offerings, you’ll want to let your customers know that they can now get in touch with you anytime and anywhere.

This feature will be attractive to new clients and should be marketed to draw them in. You can track the effectiveness of your marketing strategy by taking note of this number as your campaign launches.

Bounce Rate

This metric will show you how many users take steps to schedule a visit on your appointment planner app but do not complete the booking.

If this number is quite high it means that many potential leads are being lost. You are missing out on bookings due to factors such as non-user-friendly functions, too much information, or too many steps. This includes unavailable appointment times, errors in communication, or lengthy forms.

Actioning these areas will encourage more completed bookings. Making changes to facilitate simplicity and usability will increase customer satisfaction, also encouraging the use of this service.

This data point will reflect whether the changes you are making are having a positive impact. Notice what measures are working to decrease bounce rates by completing A/B testing. Once you have the results, you can go ahead and abandon high-bounce causing factors.

Conversion Rate

This is the opposing metric to the bounce rate. This will tell you the percentage of leads who are landing on your planner app and proceeding to complete a meeting request.

To experience growth, your business must be continually pulling in new leads. High conversion rates will give you the opportunity to not only be noticed by them but to actually bring them into your business and make them a client.

Once they are in the door (or on the line), you can work your customer service magic to keep them coming back.

Marketing efforts to increase conversion and incentives to book an appointment can be measured here. Every campaign should be monitored for engagement and click-through efficiency. This particular insight will serve as a great overall measure for your efforts.

You’ll get a feel for what consumers like and don’t like about your campaigns based on which ones drive this number up. You can then use this information for future marketing.

Appointment Reminder Use

Depending on your planner app, clients who book an appointment will either automatically receive reminders be prompted to ask for them. Of course, for automatic reminders, they will have an option to unsubscribe if they prefer.

The reason this engagement is important is that reminders are proven to decrease no-show appointments. In fact, research revealed that clients canceled less than 5% of appointments after receiving a reminder message.

On top of attending more appointments, this service will boost interaction between customers and your brand. Positive interactions lead to happier customers. Allowing automated services to improve their experience will elevate your customer service as a whole.

Aim to raise this number by encouraging existing customers to sign up. You may even want to switch from a ‘request reminder’ option to an automatic opt-in service.

On-Location or in Branch Analytics

Clients who decide to walk into a location instead of prebooking an appointment can also be measurable as well, so long as you have a lobby and visitor management solution. You can track traffic patterns and engagements with your staff, helping you notice changes in performance, where to smooth traffic peaks through proactive outreach, and where additional staffing may be needed.

Staff Bookings

This is a great measure to see how your staff are performing. You’ll be able to see who is filing the schedule and who could increase their efforts. If there is a large gap in performance from one employee to the next, you can address this imbalance with increased training and adapted rosters.

The staff who aren’t booking as many return visits or new clients may not necessarily be slacking at work. Securing appointments requires a balance of positive engagement and sales closing skills.

Pay close attention to how your top-performing staff members are engaging with customers. The customer’s experience should be consistent from start to finish. If they feel unsatisfied with your agents, this will show up in their desire to confirm a booking.

Notice the hold-ups in this experience by addressing lower-performing agents. Bring the quality of their service up to see a more balanced booking rate.

Duration and Type of Visit

Different appointment types will warrant more or less time on the schedule. Check-in and out analytics will gather information about each of these visits and let you know how long each client is on location, and whether your estimates of timing are accurate.

This will break down to their wait time and appointment duration. If your staff is able to forecast how long each appointment will be, they can take measures to schedule the next appointment at a more realistic time. This will decrease wait times and improve customer satisfaction.

Your business will also gain perspective on what duration is most effective. For example, if 1-hour appointments are securing more clients than 30-minute windows, you can adjust your booking for more of these longer sessions.

This may also work in the opposite way. Let’s say scheduling more quick format visits increase the number of clients you are able to satisfy. You can put this knowledge to work and develop a better short-form structure.

Canceled, Rescheduled, and Missed Appointments

These three analytics will be invaluable to your revenue growth. The adjustment of them is often key in your customer engagement.

Are you seeing a high number of missed appointments or repeat offenders? This is a great opportunity to improve quality engagements. As mentioned earlier, reminders are proven to decrease this number. Sign these clients up for automated reminders or have staff put in the extra effort to touch base with them if they haven’t arrived yet.

Cancelations are normal but if missed and canceled appointments are left alone, those clients will fall off the radar. You can’t rely on customers to get in touch on their own.

Rescheduled appointments should be a focus for your staff to retain customers and capture new leads. Work with your agents to develop rescheduling engagements that encourage clients to rebook straight away.

The quick follow up will let them know that you value their business and their time.

Retention

This analytic is calculated by how many return visits take place per new client visit.

Tracking retention will shed light on how many of your customers are becoming loyal clientele and who you are losing. Clients will decide to leave a company for a number of reasons.

Perhaps they aren’t happy with the service they received. They may feel that perceived value is out of alignment and your rates are too high for what you offer. The problem could even lie in the missed or canceled appointments that were never rebooked.

If you aren’t able to keep existing clients, you run the risk that each new member will leave you as well.

Your customer experience will be reflected in their desire to come back. Up your efforts and use this metric as a measure for what’s working and what’s not.

General Analytics

These insights will gather information from both in-person and online engagements. They’ll give an idea of imbalances between online experiences and on-location service.

Use these to tailor your approach and attract new customers by utilizing client patterns.

Demographics

Who does your service appeal to? The best way to track this target down is to look at your existing clientele and capitalize on what they want.

You’ll likely notice a difference between the users of your planner app’s online booking and the ones who prefer to book with your agents. This provides you with an opportunity to market differently based on preferences and ensure that you are helping your customers bank in the channel of comfort – that which is most convenient and comfortable for them.

Determine who is using either service by identifying gender, age, location, and active times. You can then market the applicable service directly to them if they are deemed strategically important to your financial institution.

For example, if your self-serve booking is seeing men aged 25-40 using the service more than others, use this information to create specific marketing campaigns to attract more of this customer. If that demographic already enjoy this feature, they will be drawn to use your bank over competitors who don’t offer it. Consider why other demographics aren’t adopting that service, and determine if its important that they do so.

High-Traffic Windows

Let’s say your bank or credit union sees 30% of its daily traffic between 3-4 pm. Using this information can help you make wiser staffing choices to ensure you can see more clients in this busier time, while keeping an eye on wait times.

This analytic will give you an idea of how many visits are being requested for this window. Combined with your time measures and available staff, you can work out exactly how many appointments you can realistically manage at this time.

This will prevent poor scheduling that causes missed opportunities or unhappy customers that have been waiting for unsatisfying lengths of time.

Clients want you to fit into their schedule, not the other way around. Providing an exceptional experience on their terms will encourage return visits, higher reviews, and recommendations. All these factors will contribute to business growth and increased revenue.

Get the Most From Your Appointment Planner App

It’s time to start digging into those extra features and using analytics to improve your banking business. You can improve customer satisfaction, generate more leads, and see higher profit margins. With benefits like this, there is no reason to ignore the number any longer.

If you don’t already have access to these data points, now is the time to investigate appointment planner apps and enterprise customer engagement platforms.

Ready to maximize engagement with your appointment planner app? Get in touch with us to learn how you can get the best scheduling system for your bank’s needs and start experiencing growth today.