Make an appointment — way better than taking a number
We did some market research earlier this year that we are now announcing. The project aimed to understand some of the nuances involving scheduling appointments for services and walking in. What we discovered was in some cases reassuring and in others surprising and I present some of our findings here.
All services are not created equal in the eyes of a representative cross section of Americans. It was clear that without an appointment people will be more patient waiting for services from someone who is perceived to be a professional. This finding holds true for financial advisers, loan originators — you name it — even portrait photographers.
Doctors are in a class by themselves. A large percentage (46.5%) of people without an appointment will wait a very long time to see a doctor but a smaller number will wait indefinitely if they have an appointment and they are less patient. And a sizeable minority — over 30% depending on the service in question — expect that, if they have an appointment, their service session should start the moment they walk in the door.
The least patient demographic in the survey is the age group of 35 to 44 year-olds. This makes a great deal of sense to me. The demographic represents people who are getting into the full swing of their careers and they may have young kids, they have cash to spend and reasons to spend it. What they lack is time, including time to wait in line for services. It strikes me that a primary question that any service business should ask is what would that demographic like? If you can make 35 to 44 year-olds happy, you are likely to be on track with everyone else.
Consumer services are a different story entirely. Customers have the shortest fuses waiting for the attention of auto repair people, retail help and the like, even if they have no appointment. Ironically, 84% said they prefer walk-in service for routine maintenance such as oil changes. The survey panel told us that their perceptions of a service correlate with appointments. They used words like important, high-quality, tailored-to-me and professional to describe appointment-based services.
My conclusion is that appointments are a good idea for almost any business trying to present a tone that is professional and offering high quality services — regardless of the professional status.
But how well received is appointment scheduling? If given a chance will people do what’s needed to set up an account on-line that would make scheduling an appointment quick and easy? The answer is yes. More than eighty percent said they would do that for services they take on a regular basis.
For the business considering implementing an appointment system there are several advantages. Beyond the perceptions of professionalism and high quality, service businesses that implement appointments have better insight into their resource requirements. There’s nothing worse than over-scheduling people to work on a day when traffic is light except under-scheduling on a day when it seems like the world wants to come through your doors; neither situation is good for business.
Appointments can certainly help alleviate the worst of the peaks and valleys. So a business that implements appointments side by side with walk-in service may actually see an improvement on the walk-in side too because the staff will be better able to fit in an occasional walk-in. More importantly, if a sizeable portion of your customers expect to walk in and begin with no waiting at all, then a business that keeps people waiting even a little is risking its profit margins without even realizing it.
Scheduling appointments was once tedious and expensive. It was tedious when the service provider relied on a pencil, a big appointment book and a bigger eraser. It became expensive when the first automation systems became available and as a result only large, expensive and professional service providers could afford such systems. Like many other aspects of modern business the situation has changed with the advent of SaaS computing. Today you can hook up a SaaS-based appointments scheduling system to your Web site and be in business in no time.
Appointment scheduling might be one of those golden nuggets that come out of this recession. A business can perform valuable innovation without changing anything about its core service, simply by offering the ability to make appointments. Innovation ideas like this are cheap and easy and they don’t come along very often.
TimeTrade, a company in the appointment scheduling market that offers both SaaS and conventional appointment scheduling systems sponsored our research.
More New Garage
Back in 2004 I wrote a white paper titled “The New Garage” which forecasted the evolution of Cloud Computing. The ideas in the paper were derived from basic economics. I thought that the cost of software, maintenance and service were so out of line that it was only a matter of time before the paradigm shifted and a new one — Cloud Computing — took its place. I am not responsible for the name and I don’t even think I offered one.
The concept of a new garage is that innovation had gotten away from innovators and entrepreneurs typically spent a lot of time raising money rather than building products. To raise money, these people often had to give away a significant chunk of their idea which resulted in a disincentive, in my mind. Better, I thought, if entrepreneurs could go back to the garage to build whatever new gizmo they could.
To do all that entrepreneurs would need vastly less expensive infrastructures from servers and real estate to systems that ran their businesses. Software and services delivered from the Cloud would enable that, I thought, and the result would be increased innovation not only here but around the world. It looks like it’s working.
One of the less well known parts of The New Garage is the idea that when the need for SI services goes down as it inevitably has done, services companies would need new ways to deploy their people. My thought was that this would mean more hands on help running the business using the software available on the Web rather than so much work installing operating systems, databases and all the rest.
With that in mind I was happy to see a press release this week from Market2Lead a Cloud-based marketing automation company based in Santa Clara, CA. The company launched marketing operations services, an offering that will among other things run campaigns for newsletters, manage invitations and registrations for seminars and events and the like.
To be sure this is not the high level strategy work, it’s more grunt work execution but it comes at a very good time. Corporate marketing departments may be somewhat depleted by the recession and before hiring people they may elect to take on a service provider like Market2Lead in an arrangement that provides a known service for a quantified cost.
I expect the idea will catch on and with it comes a down side. Companies might be a bit more reluctant to hire marketing people in the future even in a good economy and perhaps that means more people working for themselves as consultants, often in situations that may not provide benefits like health insurance or vacations. Of course that also means an opportunity for entrepreneurs who might see a chance to build an agency. That’s where we get into unknown unknowns — the consequences you can’t predict which are the ultimate drivers of economic activity.
Good luck with all of that.
Thanks, Mr. Voltaire
This is very interesting. Oracle introduced Oracle VM Template for Siebel CRM. You almost don’t need to know what a VM template is — OK, it’s a virtual machine architecture that enables customers to reduce the number of real servers they have. But that’s not the big news — the big news is that Oracle is positioning this innovation as a GREEN idea.
Yes, right in the press release they say, “By helping to reduce the number of servers needed through deployment in a virtualized environment, Oracle VM Templates for Siebel CRM effectively promote green computing and can dramatically cut costs on server purchases and maintenance, as well as energy use.
Kudos to Oracle, I say. They’ve taken on Green ideas as an important part of CRM and begun making products that reflect most people’s concerns about global warming. Fewer servers means less power to run them, air condition them and all the rest.
Of course, the greenest approach to server reduction is SaaS where a small number of very robust servers support millions of users a la Salesforce.com. But this is no time to make such comparisons and a great time to drag out one of my favorite quotes from Voltaire, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” (This proves my liberal education was really worth it.)
Simply put, running past good and seeking perfection is akin to reaching a level of diminishing returns. It would be great if SaaS took over the world and it might but not today. Meanwhile, wouldn’t it be really cool if every major corporation at least got on board with a virtual machine architecture?
The video frontier
Rolling sustainability into business development isn’t just a marketing ploy. In the CRM arena it’s an effective way to communicate with more customers and prospects at a lower cost.
Last summer, when a gallon of regular peaked above four dollars per gallon, Beagle Research published a white paper on sustainability and CRM. I am happy to report that there are many signs in CRM and elsewhere of industries taking the first steps toward more sustainable business.
We began to see changes in the ways we organize our society and work when gas hit four dollars — Americans drove more than a hundred billion miles less in the year ending in November 30, 2008, for example. But, too often, reducing travel frequently means falling economic activity. Airlines were nearly crippled when businesses began curtailing travel. An economic recovery and unrestrained demand will likely mean that the price of oil, and the gasoline and jet fuel from which they are derived, will again rise — beyond four dollars. With global demand rising and supply peaking it’s hard to see otherwise.
All this went into our thinking last year and one of our conclusions was that front-office business processes needed to become more energy efficient. Face-to-face sales calls would be curtailed and replaced by greater reliance on Web-meetings and Web-conferences, and enhanced reliance on in-house produced video.
Our ability to make documentary-style (Ken Burns) videos using desktop technology has accelerated very quickly in the past year or two. While there is no set standard for these clips — and there shouldn’t be — there are numerous examples of CRM-oriented videos coming into the market. We believe that video production needs to reach down to the sales and marketing departments in the same way that desktop publishing has. Why?
Giving marketing people the ability to produce professional looking video will not replace the need for travel or product slicks, brochures or even white papers. But video will begin to provide valuable content in a format that is easy to absorb supplementing sales by conventional means.
There are numerous examples of CRM vendors already turning to video as another way to get a message across. Microsoft, SAP and Oracle all have produced video content that touts their products. It’s very effective, especially if it is kept short and moving. A short video might not replace a brochure or a white paper with all the additional detail that only print can provide. But video can deliver a message quicker and more clearly when an impression is what’s needed.
Video can exist independently on the Web and it is a medium better suited to viral transmission than print. How many times each day or week do we get some clip passed along to us? The number might vary, but our experience says it’s increasing. And what are you more likely to do, read a white paper or watch a video?
The next step is for CRM customers — in all industries — to become fluent in desktop video development, a big step for sure. We’ve grown accustomed to building and sitting through PowerPoint presentations, most of which are not that good according to Garr Reynolds. In his book, “Presentationzen,” Reynolds writes about what’s wrong with what used to be called slide shows — too many bullet points, too few pictures to engage the mind, droning voices, and dark rooms. Worst of all, Reynolds says, is when someone sends the slides or a printout expecting you to derive meaning from all those cryptic bullets.
Better to build a documentary video out of stock photos and voice animation, and then stick it on your Web site or on a public sharing site like YouTube so that the video can sell for you when customers are receptive. A simple condensed URL or “turl” makes a video viral in ways that slide shows will never be.
I work on a Mac and all of the tools I need are on my computer. I have not checked Windows lately, but perhaps the latest version has similar tools, if not, they are available and inexpensive for Windows users.
Some might object to widespread video use because letting salespeople develop video can take away too much selling time. I agree. Video should be the province of the marketing team and it’s a great way for them to reclaim responsibility for message creation and maintenance. When salespeople got the ability to make slides, it inevitably led to message degradation — time for marketing to reassert itself.
Out of the last recession we got on-demand computing and Web meetings, each of which became great successes because they save their users a lot of money without degrading their ability to do business. From this recession Web conferences and in-house video are showing good signs of life. In a recovery, the high cost of travel will demand alternative solutions. Video is the next marketing frontier, a natural content carrier for ideas that have to stand on their own. Early adopters are already engaged; it’s time to familiarize yourself.
NetSuite summer announcement
The headline on the press release read: “NetSuite Offers Sage Partners Major Incentives to Begin Growing their Business on the NetSuite Cloud” and I figured, it must be summer. For the last few years, Sage has announced an offer like this. For the last couple of years it was a take away program for salesforce.com customers.
I like NetSuite, they offer a good package of ERP and CRM software delivered as a SaaS service. They’ve made a lot of smart moves in the last couple of years including their IPO (which was not just smart but brilliant) and an apparent decision to move up market from their original SMB focus.
Going after larger companies made sense because I think NetSuite found out that their then target market didn’t have all of the resources — human and financial — needed to implement such an all-encompassing suite of software. Though the product is good, any ERP implementation comes with a great deal of thought work that’s needed to rationalize business processes before automating them. I think some small companies just choke on the effort.
Now it looks like NetSuite is trying to go after the SMB space again, this time with a full court press on Sage’s partners. Just as I like NetSuite I like Sage too. As a company Sage certainly has product and partner issues, but any company does. What’s interesting to me about the NetSuite PR is the hyperbole it exudes.
Though the PR has several quotes from Sage partner take-aways the text is over the top. One paragraph starts with, “NetSuite expects this program will find a warm reception in a Sage channel partner community wracked with fear, uncertainty and doubt about the future of on-premise applications…”
Wracked with fear? Really?
I have to say I used to wonder about Sage too and about when they’d get their SaaS act together. They’ve been late to the party, but not AWOL, they have products, especially in the CRM world. Lately, though, I’ve concluded that Sage might know something about the space that I’ve been missing. It’s a rather conservative market from the perspective of new product adoption.
The obvious success of SaaS in CRM may be enough to move the ERP partners but maybe not. Undoubtedly some will move, the PR is proof of that. But building a successful partner program is something that takes a great deal of investment in time and money. And although NetSuite has been in the partner business for some time already, I think they’ll have to execute very well to make in-roads here. It’s a conservative market and it’s summer. In a recession.
As the Zen master says in an old joke, “We’ll see.”
