An appointment is usually visualized as a commitment between two or more individuals or groups of people to meet at a specified time on a designated date. This may look like a no-brainer for a friend-meets-friend for coffee scenario but a customer appointment in a retail store has a lot more to it than meets the eye.
This is where we enter the realm of maintenance or management of an appointment. What happens if the appointment is canceled or the customer wants to reschedule? How do we give back to the resource pool the time that the concerned store associate has now regained? What happens when the customer is running late but still wants to come in to finish the (now delayed) appointment – do you push back the subsequent customer appointments; is it even an option?
Then there is the need for in-appointment messaging by the associate asking for possible help from his supervisor during the appointment to answer a customer query or request for discounts. Recording of the outcome of the appointment – sale, no sale, quote, etc. – along with feedback/comments for further analysis is essential.
Integration of the appointments with personal calendars of people and feeding of customer discussion and outcome details to other systems for analytics and reporting are just some other aspects that position a powerful appointments booking system at the center of a whole ecosystem.
