We get customers who will book an appointment and when they get off the phone, they still call around booking other shops who may come faster or cheaper, next thing you know you’re getting a cancellation call.
This gets expensive as sometimes we aren’t able to fill the slot that could have been offered to someone else.
Should we ask for a card over The phone?
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I’m not in the industry, but as a consumer I would find this unusual as I’ve never encountered that from other similar trades. Maybe if you pitched it as a booking fee of $25 or something cheap that would be rolled into the final bill? Don’t know if that’s worth it at that point. I often do in-person consulting and bill at the time of service - I just try to do a quick pitch of why I’m better than my competitors before I get off of the phone. I just look at cancellations as part of the business model
When you talk to the client, you need to really cement in their mind that there’s no point in talking to anyone else. When you take that call, what does your script look like?
Asking for a card over the phone will drastically reduce your bookings and probably isn’t worth it. Cancellations are a royal pain in the ass and a part of life. It feels so disrespectful of your time.
Warn people about your cancellation policy at the end of the booking call with something like “Please give us 24 hours notice to change this appointment and avoid a $50 cancellation fee.” And then send a text message reminder at the 24 hr mark re-iterating that message. Note, you cannot collect on these $50 cancellation fees but it serves as a deterrent.
Ultimately your biggest tool for avoiding cancellations is offering quick service which is easier said than done.There are 3 things I did that helped to reduce my cancellations:
- Posted my rates online
- Set up online booking
- Had a cancellation policy
I realised that the number one reason people called me was they wanted to know how much it would cost for us to come out, and when we could come out.
Once you have them on the phone though, its really easy to develop a phone patter like “Our rates are $X Service Call and covers this much labour and $Y labour price after that. We have availability tomorrow, would you like us to book you in?” and before the customer has a chance to think about it, they have an appointment booked. Problem was, they would do exactly as you describe: They rang around others and made other arrangements after they had some time.
By posting our rates online, and making online bookings available, we had a higher number of customers who we answered the top 2 questions for, and wanted us to come out. There were still a small number of customers who would make a booking and make another booking with someone else and conveniently “forget” about the one with us. This is where our Cancellation Policy comes in.
Our Cancellation Policy pretty lets them know that up until a business day before the appointment, if they cancelled our booking they wouldn’t be charged. The less notice we had, then the more we would charge. We sent this out with every confirmation and reminder email (our online booking system helps with automating this). This gives them a “signal” that if they didn’t let us know asap that they wanted to cancel, then it would cost them money. Did we really charge them? No, because we often have customers who will take a “last minute” booking, but the “threat” of a charge lit that fire under their tail not to forget to let us know.