Hiring excess manpower to handle bookings, for just-in-case situations, will lead to too much of manpower in non-essential circumstances, ending up in a revenue drain. At the same time, there are also conditions, where a specific job role for appointment handling is not given much importance. This can lead to over-burdening and frustration among other employees, who are to take up an extra job role, which might result in frequent employee turnover.
A customer on hold, who is waiting on the call to book an appointment is more likely to get frustrated and hang up the call before scheduling his appointment. Instant service is what a customer is looking for, no one is ready to wait for hours to just book an appointment with you.
A customer may call you for less complicated issues, like to know the opening and closing hours of your business, location, or availability of schedules. Such repetitive and unexciting questions may sometimes annoy your employee. Your receptionist may get bored of the monotonous job nature and sometimes may get grumpy, which might affect your customer base.
Apart from that, it is less likely for a person to take up such a boring role, that is often not paid well, thereby making the role uncertain and leading to increased employee turnover.
Surviving in any business depends on how swiftly you catch up with your competitors. If you are lagging behind in any field, you may lose a good lot of your client base. If your competitors are scaling their business digitally, and upgrading their traditional booking system into an AI-based automated booking system, your customer is sure to expect the same from you.
Traditional booking systems are not very swift, when compared to automated booking systems, they have their own drawbacks, call on hold, unorganized appointment scheduling, unnoticed cancellations are few of them. In order to compete with your competitors and to survive, you will have to adopt the same. And moreover accepting the technological advances is the best thing you can do to upgrade your business.