Surviving the Daily Deal Customer Surge
For Nina DeGidio Haarer, owner of Complete Body Works, running a daily deal was a great way to get new massage customers. And 900 clients later, DeGidio Haarer is able to handle the influx of appointments despite her being the only employee.
DeGidio uses Schedulicity to track and organize her appointments, allowing her to handle the surge of new patrons without compromising the service by over booking or missing appointments.
The online scheduling and calendar manager geared toward small businesses, allows users to schedule appointments, make changes in real time and share their calendar with multiple people.
Just last week the company released a deal manager feature that helps businesses identify the maximum number of appointments that can be generated over the lifespan of a given daily offer.
“If I didn’t use Schedulicity I would have had to spend money hiring an office staff to accommodate the influx of calls,” said DeGidio Haarer. “People want to hear from someone right away to make sure they are not getting scammed and want to be able to make an appointment right away. This made them feel more confident because they could make their appointment ahead of time and see it online.”
After running promotions, small businesses are often inundated with calls from the deal seekers, which can disrupt normal business flow and turn loyal customers off. Schedulicity’s Deal Manager determines how many promotional appointments will be accepted per day or for the entire duration of the deal.
“A lot of daily deals are front-end loaded,” said David Galvan, president of Schedulicity, noting some of its customers got more than 100 calls in the first couple of days after running a deal. Merchants have a hard time scheduling the daily-deal appointments, he said. “They miss out on walk-in business and from their current customer base. They spend all their time in first two weeks delivering to the daily deal.”
Deal Manager is free for the first 30 days costs $39.99 a month after that and includes Schedulicity’s existing services. Customers can check the calendar online to confirm their appointment and check for cancelations.
With Deal Manager, businesses can either set up the online calendar on their own, which Galvan said takes about 10 or 15 minutes, or they can request the daily deal provider to do it on their behalf. Schedulicity has had talks with daily deal websites about the service, but it hasn’t announced any partnerships as of yet.
“We’re not trying to be disruptive technology to the daily deal space,” said Galvan. “We’re trying to make it a little bit better for both [parties].” The daily deal guys are all starting to think about providing better services for merchants.”
Deal Manager was just unveiled this week, but Jerry Nettuno, Chief Executive of Schedulicity, said the company has already received interest from customers that are planning on launching a daily deal. “This is about creating a solution to help customers utilizing the daily deal space.” This drastically enhances deals for merchants by making scheduling easier.”