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Online Appointment Books : An Organic Revolution
Thursday, November 03, 2005 Posted: 16:35 PM (EST)
Online booking is becoming a highly sought after prize among the owners of salons and spas these days. Not only do the potential time savings make sense from the business standpoint, it also provides an extremely client oriented service.
The more ethereal developers might refer to this as integrating organic design into the day to day operations of an otherwise rigid business structure. In raw terms, organic design means that one party has the ability to influence another, and the second adapts positively in response to the first party's actions.
Consider a sealed plastic bag filled with water and resting on your table....you can poke it with your finger and reshape the container or move it along the surface, but the fluid remains intact and unscathed inside the plastic bag. This is my interpretation of organic business design. In this case it is the plastic container which facilitates organic interaction and positive outcomes of that interaction between the finger and the fluid inside the plastic bag.
In the case of online booking it is the user interface which becomes the facilitator for organic interaction between business owners and their clients. However, if the user interface isn't very pliable then it will be difficult for the client to interact with the business. Poorly designed systems will impede the convenience factor and make it difficult for the client to actually book their own appointments.
In many instances, and I have seen this in case after case of systems proclaiming to provide online booking, the plastic isn't hi-tech plastic at all but is simply a clear glass container. In contrast to my analogy of the plastic bag and organic design, a glass container will not facilitate a whole lot of interaction between a business and their client. The only thing a client can do with it is push it across the table. So instead of being able to actually book their own appointments online, these types of systems only permit a client to request an appointment.
This is the nature of the name game in this highly competitive online appointment revolution. In a truly organic system the clients will be able to confirm their own appointments without any need for assistance from the owner. At the same time the plastic bag must be tough enough and secure enough to prevent the possibility of a leak.
So when you start shopping for an online appointment system look for these three characteristics...it must be pliable...it must be resilient...and it must be strong.
Ron Poole is the managing editor of Hair Say Headlines and Hair Say Newsroom.
Copyright 2005 Beauty By Us Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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