A client calls on a Tuesday to move her Thursday appointment. Your hands are in someone’s hair. You wipe them, find the phone, open the app, scroll to Thursday and move her. Then you apologize to the woman in the chair. Three minutes. If you drive to jobs, it is the same call taken at the side of the road.
That happens more than once a week. Nobody sold you those phone calls. They are the gap in the software you already pay for every month. They turned up quietly, so you have never added them up.
Most booking software gets set up once and then runs untouched for years. So here are five questions. Put them to the software you pay for now, or to the next person selling you one.
If you do not take appointments
Not every business books a time. You might take walk-ins, or run classes with a roster and signed waivers, or bill memberships on the first of the month. Most of what follows still applies to you. The software you need is different from a booking calendar, and we would rather say so than sell you one. The last question, about your customer list and what happens the month you stop paying, applies to you word for word.
1. Is she booking, or just asking?
Start with the one that catches the most people. When somebody picks a time on your site, is she taking that time or asking for it?
From the outside they look almost identical. She picks a time she would like, presses send, and gets a message saying you will be in touch to confirm. Then she waits. You are working, so you see it at seven the next morning and reply. By then she has booked somewhere else. She was not impatient. She did not know whether she had an appointment. Somebody who is not sure keeps looking.
A real booking means the times on the screen are the times you are actually open. When she picks one, it is hers that second. Nobody else can take it.
The other half of this question is whether the confirmation goes out without you touching anything. Book yourself an appointment at nine in the evening and put the phone down. If something is still waiting for you when you wake up, you do not have a booking system. You have an inbox with a calendar next to it.
2. What stops two people taking the same two o’clock?
Two people can be looking at the same Thursday in the same second. It happens more often than you would think.
If nothing takes that time off the screen while the first one is finishing, both get a confirmation for two o’clock. Tomorrow you sort it out. That means phoning somebody who did nothing wrong and asking her to move. She will probably be lovely about it. She will also be a little less sure of you than she was.
This matters most at the paying step. If you take a deposit, there is a minute or two while she types in her card numbers. If that time is still on offer during that minute, you have built a race. It should come off the screen the moment she starts, and go back up if she gives up.
So ask whoever supports your software a flat question. What stops two people booking the same time at once? “The system handles that” is not an answer. “It is locked while the first person finishes, then released” is.
3. Can she change it herself, without phoning you?
Every time a customer phones you to change something, the software has handed the job back to you. And you only hear from the ones who phone.
The one you never hear from is the woman who could not face phoning to cancel. She said nothing, and she did not turn up. That is not rudeness. It is somebody avoiding an awkward two minutes. A time handed back on Tuesday can be sold again. An empty two o’clock on Thursday cannot.
So ask it plainly. Can she cancel or move her own appointment at ten at night? From the confirmation she already has? Without phoning you, without downloading an app, and without a password she made once and has forgotten? Each of those is a place where people give up, and the account is the worst of them. Nobody wants a login with a hair salon.
Easy cancelling sounds like the wrong goal. So pick the cancellation you would rather have. The early one you can still fill, or the silence at half past two.
4. Can she do it standing up, with one thumb?
Do this standing up, on your own phone, with one thumb. That is how it really happens. On the bus, in a lineup, on the couch with a sleeping child on the other arm. Very few people book you at a desk.
Count the taps between your home page and a list of real times. Watch what happens when the keyboard comes up for the phone number. If the page jumps and swallows the button you were about to press, that is where people leave. See whether you have to pinch and zoom to read the times. Then try it once off your wifi, and time how long the screen stays blank.
You know what everything is called. If it still takes you more than a minute, a stranger takes longer. She is not choosing between you and the shop down the road. She is choosing between finishing this and going to sleep.
5. Whose list is it, and what happens when you stop paying?
Every booking quietly builds a list. Names, phone numbers, emails, what she had done, when she last came in. After three years that list is one of the most valuable things your business owns. And it is being built inside somebody else’s software.
Two questions settle it.
Can you download it yourself, tonight, without asking anybody’s permission? Into a spreadsheet you can open, with the names, the numbers and the history in it? Not “can support send me a report”. If the answer is a support ticket, the list is not really yours.
And what happens the month you stop paying? Does the booking page come down? Does it take the appointments inside it with it? The people booked in six weeks are sitting on somebody else’s computer. If it switches off, are they told? Do you get their names? Or do they turn up at a shop that is not expecting them?
None of that makes renting wrong. It means you should know what you are renting, so that leaving one day is a decision rather than a surprise.
When the simple tool is the right answer
If you are one person with one calendar, a small booking tool built into your site is genuinely the right answer. Anybody telling you otherwise is selling. A modest monthly fee, an afternoon to set up, real open times, confirmations that send themselves, and cancelling in one tap. That clears most of this list. Paying a lot more for the same thing built from scratch would waste your money.
It stops being the right answer at a specific point, and the point is not how big you are. It is when the tool starts costing you something other than its fee. Usually one of four things:
- Your week gets complicated and it cannot keep up. This person does that service. That treatment needs the room. There is a gap after a colour.
- It starts taking a cut. Per booking, or per customer the platform decides it introduced.
- You cannot get your customer list out.
- It does not fit how you work, so you keep a paper book beside it. Now you have two calendars and one of them is wrong.
Until one of those is true, the money is better spent elsewhere.
So run the five questions before you change anything. Usually one or two come back wrong, not five. A problem you can name in a sentence is often a setting nobody turned on. Change it, live with it a month, then decide. If the answers came back mostly fine, do nothing. There is no prize for replacing software that does its job.
If you want to see the other end of it, the work page walks through the booking page we build, screen by screen. And if you would rather somebody outside ran these questions across your setup, that is what the free website sample is. You send your business name. We build two sections of your real website, using your own words and pictures, and send you the link. It is yours to look at whether or not you ever hire us. Nobody can promise you more bookings out of any of this. What you can have is booking that stops losing the ones you already earned.