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The offline world was already moving online before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic simply expedited this inevitable development. Now, there are very few things you can’t do online, including online booking.
In fact, enterprises need to keep up with the transition just to stay afloat. To do so, they have had to provide the means and resources necessary for their employees to work remotely. They have also had to revise their websites and apps in accordance with coding developments, including those of online booking services.
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The Importance of Online Booking Services
Enterprises that offer appointments, reservations, or other scheduled services now offer modern scheduling functionality online. Mostly this is through their own websites and apps. In this way, their customers can easily schedule all their appointments with a click of the mouse.
To be sure, online booking services aren’t new. Airlines, concert venues, and car rentals have been offering these services for years. What’s new is that virtually any enterprise that offers scheduled services now must offer these services online, else they risk going obsolete.
For instance, dentist offices now must offer online scheduling services like OnSched’s appointment API to keep their customers coming back. So do barbershops, nail salons, and even zoos.
The Right Online Booking Services Cater to Dwindling Attention Spans
These days, attention spans are dwindling. Customer patience is also wearing thin. Now that customers can do almost everything online, they expect rapid service. Having to go through too many online steps, or having to wait for webpages to load, can feel like standing in a line where there doesn’t need to be one.
This applies to online booking services. It’s easy for enterprises to lose their customers’ attention and patience when they don’t offer seamless online scheduling services.
It’s also easy for enterprises to frustrate their own employees when they can’t easily use their computers and phones to schedule meetings and the like. And when employees can’t easily do these things digitally, they end up wasting potentially productive time.
To meet the needs of their customers and employees, enterprises need to not only fully automate their scheduling services, but also make these services quick and intuitive to use.
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White-Label Scheduling APIs Make Life Easier for Busy Business Owners
Often, it would be unproductive, expensive, or time-consuming for an enterprise to build their own online booking service from scratch. In these cases, the best option for enterprises is to leverage a leading, white-labeled scheduling API that’s cloud-based, full-featured, and easy to get running in days.
These APIs should offer single sign-on platforms that seamlessly integrate into any CMR. This means that when enterprises use a white-labeled scheduling tool, it fits with their unique marketing language as well as the style of the booking platform. In other words, the online booking service an enterprise incorporates should be on brand.
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The Bottom Line
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us again and again that enterprises that do not adapt to the times quickly fall behind or even go obsolete. Online booking will soon be standard, and enterprises will need to leverage online scheduling services to keep pace.
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