When you think about what makes your customer journey successful, do you think about great sales conversations and meetings? There’s no doubt that reassuring and exciting conversations play a huge role in customer satisfaction, but there’s one essential element that is just as important: scheduling.
We know! It’s not sexy – but it is vital to your customer journey. If you want your customers to tell anyone who will listen about their experience with you, you need to be spot on with your scheduling and communication.
This is where Calendly can revolutionize your customer experience. We spoke to Kallie, the Building Consultant Assistant for Manual Builders, an on-your-own-lot Home Builder, about how she’s used Calendly to do just that.
What is Calendly?
Calendly is a simple scheduling tool used by millions of businesses all over the world to arrange online and offline meetings and appointments. Calendly is packed with great features to make scheduling easier for teams and customers, improving the customer experience and allowing teams to be more productive.
Kallie says, “Calendly is so modern and user-friendly, it’s neat, easy to use, and the workflows allow you to manage everything in one place, so you don’t have to dig around for what you want.”
Why is Calendly so Beneficial for Home Builders?
Calendly ensures no balls are dropped
Kallie works for a building consultant that builds homes around a 1.5-hour drive away from their home base, so ensuring there aren’t any scheduling issues is key to ensuring no one’s time is wasted. With both the consultant and the client driving to the lot to discuss plans, miscommunication can result in serious frustration on either side. Calendly offers a host of features Kallie has optimized to ensure no one feels uncertain about when or if a meeting is happening.
Drastically reduces no-shows
Leading on from our point above, Kallie says they’ve experienced a drastically reduced rate of no-shows to meetings since using Calendly, thanks to its automatic features. While automation can put customers at arm’s length, Calendly’s automation features increase the number of touch points and reassure customers that they’re being thought of and prioritized.
Eliminates back-and-forth
Kallie’s home builder is in the unique position of working on a unique project with every client – there’s very little replicable from one project to the next. They generally have three in-person meetings with clients before the work begins, one or two before they sign the contract, and one after, and then they’ll meet on Zoom for subsequent meetings. That means there are a lot of meetings to schedule!
Before moving to Calendly, Kallie would have to schedule everything through Outlook, manually send out confirmation emails, and follow up with phone calls. Calendly has automated all the back-and-forth and even rescheduling can be done in a few clicks.
Creates a tailored experience and eliminates uncertainty
One of the features Kallie loves about Calendly is its new text confirmation feature. This feature follows up the confirmation emails with a text message that reminds clients about their meeting and asks them to confirm. This feature makes customers feel taken care of, and it eliminates a lot of uncertainty around meetings.
When appointments are made a week or more in advance, it is easy to become anxious about whether or not either party has forgotten their meeting, but the reminders for the client provide them with the reassurance that they’re being taken care of. Trust is such a key element of any sales process but is all the more important for home builders, and Calendly quickly increases trust with little effort from your team.
Everyone on the team can see what’s going on with a client
Calendly syncs automatically with all relevant team members’ calendars and with your CRM so all team members can see what’s going on with a client whenever they need to. For Shared Drive, this means that we can see when in-person meetings are scheduled, and there’s no guessing or wondering about when a new touch point needs to happen. Better still, all events that take place are kept in a log so team members can review what has happened as well as what’s planned.
Frees up the team’s time
Of course, all this reduced need for communication between team members means they’re free to get on with the work that’s meaningful. The importance of timely and consistent communication throughout the customer journey cannot be overstated, but Calendly takes the minutiae and automates it, so only purposeful and worthwhile communication takes place.
The result of all these benefits is a customer experience clients are willing to rave about – Kallie reports repeat clients and referral clients raving about the confirmation text messages because it reassures them that everything is progressing as promised.
Calendly creates transparency amongst team members (both in-person and OSCs), meaning they can contact the client without retreading ground or assuming a meeting has taken place when it hasn’t. All this adds up to a client experience that puts your business at the top of your industry.
