Cutting down scheduling time with recurring appointments
Why online booking feels risky for grooming salons
The idea of setting up online booking initially sounds great. But for some groomers, online booking can feel risky.
For example, many dogs take different amounts of time to groom. Sometimes you don’t want certain dogs to be together in the same room. So a lot of times, online booking can feel too risky.
How can a salon cut down scheduling time without full online booking?
Recurring appointments cut scheduling time by capturing the regularity that’s already in your book. If you squint at the appointments many of your customers make, you’ll notice a lot of them repeat — so you can set the schedule once instead of re-booking by phone every cycle.
Some customers might come back every 3 weeks, others maybe every 9 weeks, depending on their dog’s hair growth, their budget and their tolerances. We can take advantage of this regularity and start creating recurring appointments.
How much time does recurring booking actually save?
In Katie’s case, she estimates it takes about 10 minutes of her employee’s time to go back and forth with a customer on the phone or SMS to lock in an appointment. For a customer that comes in every 3 weeks, that’s about 17 times a year.
That’s over an hour and a half of time spent scheduling on that one customer in a year. With even 100 customers like that, we’re talking 150 hours spent scheduling instead of grooming (or…resting!).
How do I set up a recurring appointment in All Fur Dogs?
You can create recurring appointments directly in the All Fur Dogs app in a few steps:
- When creating an appointment, click the ‘Duration & Recurring’ accordion.
- Click ‘Enable recurring’.
- Choose the frequency (weekly or monthly), and how many weeks or months (for example, every 3 weeks, or once a month).
- Optionally, specify the day of the week.
- Set the maximum number of appointments.
You can see a preview of all the appointments that get created.