Automating Job Scheduling
As software, machine learning and AI become more advanced, their value continues to be realized. This shift is especially relevant in companies that want to streamline business processes.
Many businesses are using technology to complete recurring tasks or tasks that they would have otherwise had to do manually. These manual ways aren't effective, often being tedious and time consuming.
Some of the tasks many businesses are doing manually are appointment scheduling, booking service providers online, invoicing and billing clients, accounting, expense tracking, customer service, social media and more. According to Wakefield Research and Concur, 84% of small businesses still rely on manual processes.
Scheduling, bookings, and the collection of payments are important processes in your business. Scheduling is crucial to securing customer business. If scheduling an appointment with your service provider is difficult, then your customer will be less likely to choose your business.
How can automation benefit your business?
The risk of double bookings, over-bookings, or other human errors are also a possibility with poor scheduling tools. Improving your scheduling process can lead to an increase of sales and profits. Furthermore automating the billing and invoicing allows you to efficiently collect payments without letting invoices slip through the cracks.
As a result of these scheduling challenges, software companies began developing software as a solution that can be sold to multiple companies, particularly when it is sold as a Software as a Service (SaaS) product. The good news is that implementing these solutions doesn’t have to be difficult and can result in huge benefits for your company.
What is job scheduling software?
Job scheduling software is a tool that helps manage your service business’ appointments. Using this platform your customers can schedule, reschedule, or cancel their appointments with your mobile workers.
Now if you’re wondering how mobile workers fit into the picture, these are the people who provide the services your business offers. What makes them mobile is that these workers typically travel to people’s homes in order to provide the service.
Ultimately, job scheduling software can be used to manage mobile workers and help with scheduling their appointments at job sites with clients.
Best job scheduling software features
Some job scheduling software options are more advanced than others and have more features:
a) Travel zone and route optimization
Other more advanced software options allow your mobile workers to first upload their travel zone and availability then based on these availabilities, your customers can schedule, reschedule, and cancel their appointments directly on the platform without having to contact your team, reducing time consuming back and forth.
For businesses that prefer to have their agents do the bookings on behalf of customers, these advanced features still save time since the agent can immediately inform the customer of available time slots and match the customer with the right service provider.
The job scheduling software also has the capability to optimize your mobile workers schedules. This means the software will optimize routes and build the schedule in a way that reduces wear and tear of vehicles and also improves fuel efficiency.
b) Scheduling service appointments
More advanced job scheduling software will also do most of the scheduling work for you. Less stellar options will still require someone to manage the software on the back end, but advanced software will do things like automatically create waitlists.
Customers can use the platform to schedule, reschedule or cancel their appointments at their own convenience.
c) Online sales tool - Invoicing and payment processing
Another way job scheduling software can be valuable is by helping to increase sales and profit. Since the scheduling process is simplified by the software, customers can easily schedule their appointments.
Unlike competitors who may take days to respond to a customer and confirm a date for an appointment, your company’s easy scheduling platform will have an advantage.
The job scheduling software can also act as a recurring revenue machine by automatically taking payments from your customers credit cards. When a job is complete, an invoice is automatically generated and sent to the customer. After the payment is processed, a receipt is issued.
Leveraging software that can process payments which means your office administrators don’t have to chase after payments from customers and your mobile workers won’t have to carry card readers to job sites to get payments. Getting payments online also means that your business will have less cash flow issues.
Ready to get started?
Since many businesses are looking for ways to automate tedious tasks that they’re currently doing manually, job scheduling software has become a solution to their problems.
This software creates many efficiencies when it comes to scheduling logistics between customers and mobile workers. However, it is important to keep in mind that some job scheduling software options simply offer businesses more advanced features. So, make sure you do your research when deciding which job scheduling software to use for your business.
