ATTENTION; An ever shrinking and difficult resource. This is the reality we are currently living in and as such, we must adapt, or be left behind..
Something you might not want to hear..
This comes from experience. Both as a consumer with very limited attention and as an employee of a event management company, trying to package together other businesses services for our clients enquiries. If we can’t book in or find the answers to our basic questions, sorry, we don’t have the time to wait for you to be ready to give it to us!
If I don’t get an answer when I am looking for it, 9 times out of 10, I am on the phone to your competitor within 5 minutes.
Here are the numbers
In a research of over 2000 participants in 2015, Microsoft social scientists found our attention span is around 8 seconds. So essentially, if you are a service business offering the customers desired service, you’re booking phone number or contact form should be reachable within 8 seconds of scanning your website.
If a phone number is all you offer, you have 8 seconds to answer the phone. If you have an online enquiry form that requires the customer to wait for you to get back to them, you are without a doubt, losing business to more automated businesses.
Depending on your service there will also be an optimal time of day and week that your target customers will be looking for your service. With enough data, Google Analytics should clearly tell you this. Now, if those peak interest times are outside of your office or phone answering hours, we have a problem.
Think about your own experiences. When looking for a product or service for your own personal needs, what time do you browse the internet to find what you are after?
Make life easier for your customers and yourself
I understand the concern business owners have when considering the migration process from fully involved to trusting technology. You might be thinking “this doesn’t apply to my business because..” or “what happens if..” but trust me, if your business relies on you to answer the phone or email to capture a booking/sale and you have missed calls in the past. You are losing sales because of this. The benefit of automating the booking and sales process as much as possible far outweighs the few, if any issues that may arise from a double booking or similar problem.
If companies like Air Bnb can create a universal booking system for a global network of Bed and Breakfasts, you can create a system that doesn’t rely on you being on call 24/7!
So what are you waiting for?
As we are well aware, there are hundreds of different types of businesses set up on a variety of different platforms. The most popular Serviced Based Businesses are built on WordPress, whilst Ecommerce is dominated by Shopify. For service businesses built on WordPress, we recommend is WP Booking Calendar whilst for Shopify, we like Easy Appointment Booking. If you’re Website is built on any other platform, feel free to Contact Us and we will take a look for you.
Small pain for big gain
Obviously this may take a week or two to get used to. There may be some initial unexpected errors and growing pains. You will need to adapt and remember to check or update your availabilities within the booking system as they change. But once you get used to this new system, you will wonder how you ever worked without it.
Now, if you are concerned about the questions that may need to be addressed before your customers decide to book, traditionally a FAQ’s page would suffice. However, with the 8 second attention span in mind, if there are more than 10 FAQ’s, we believe a well built Chat Bot is the solution. Essentially, building a chat bot is just creating an easy to access and fancy FAQ system. Once built and optimized, it can instantly answer those repeat questions 24/7!
So spend the free time wisely
Make reference to the time it should save business owners and extra work it should deliver
