As the saying goes, “You only get one chance to make a good first impression.” Thankfully for B2B marketers and sellers, there’s automated meeting scheduling, a solution that is becoming a mission-critical tech stack essential.
Automated meeting scheduling automates the scheduling process for visitors to your website. Integrated within your site, automated meeting scheduling empowers site users — your customers — to immediately schedule meetings with the most appropriate representative.
Just a few years ago, automated meeting scheduling was perhaps considered a “nice to have.” The category has now risen to a new level of prominence for one simple reason: Customers want it that way.
There’s a New B2B Buyer and a New B2B Buying Journey
Today’s B2B buying journeys have changed, heavily influenced by buyers’ experiences with B2C buying journeys over the past decade.
In their personal lives, in their B2C journeys, buyers enjoy — and value — friction-free experiences. However, at work, in their B2B buying journeys, they run into friction from almost the moment they start.
According to TrustRadius, virtually 100 percent of B2B buyers want to self-serve part or all of their buying journeys. Somewhere along the buying journey, though, your buyer will look to engage, and if that request to connect, human-to-human, is mishandled, your buyer’s poor experience just might cost you the deal.
Enter automated meeting scheduling to save the day (and the buyer journey)!
Automated Meeting Scheduling Delivers Best First Impression
Self-service buying journeys mean buyers push back engaging directly with a company’s representatives until they absolutely, positively have to. It’s at that precise moment where the proverbial rubber meets the road for B2B revenue teams. If that customer outreach is lost or otherwise mishandled, it can leave a lasting negative perception and pose a real threat to closing the deal.
Traditional scheduling required a customer to complete an online form. Then, the fun, or rather, the lack of fun, began. The submission of the form began a process of phone calls, voice mails and emails to nail down a meeting date and time. In a busy world that seems to only get busier and busier, the scheduling process often entailed a numbing amount of back-and-forth — one estimate states it takes 7.5 emails on average just to schedule a meeting.
Who would blame a customer for cutting bait and fishing elsewhere?
Automated meeting scheduling solutions, like LeanData’s BookIt, flip the script. Now, when a customer completes a form, the solution immediately works through the business’s particular custom logic to pull up the calendar availability for the very best representative to meet the customer’s needs. The customer selects the date and time that works best for them, on their own terms, and the meeting is booked. Notifications go out to the appropriate parties and all potential back-and-forth scheduling nightmares are averted.
Importantly, the customer’s expectations are met or exceeded on an important step in their buying journey.
Automated Meeting Scheduling is the Gift That Keeps on Giving
Automated scheduling delivers more than an improved customer experience, allowing site visitors to quickly and easily schedule appointments at their convenience. Additional benefits include:
- Increased productivity. Quick scheduling resolution eliminates all back-and-forth communication to schedule appointments, allowing an organization’s sales and service reps to take on and complete more value-added activities.
- Optimal allocation of internal resources. Customizable scheduling logic optimizes individual calendars and reduces scheduling conflicts.
- Reduced number of missed meetings. Automated confirmations, including reminders and other pre-meeting collateral, decrease missed appointments.
- Operational improvement. Aggregated data delivers insights on a variety of customer-centric metrics, fueling the continuous improvement of communication strategies and meeting scheduling execution.
Start Off Your Engagement With Customers on the Right Foot
Traditional meeting scheduling is rife with friction, and onerous for both customers and a company alike. Automating manual processes puts power into the hands of customers, allowing them to immediately schedule meetings to further advance their journeys with an organization.
Critically, automated scheduling eliminates unnecessary time delays in a response to customer inquiries. Customers’ expectations are met or exceeded as they, themselves, set the meeting time. And, most importantly to the company, no inquiry ever gets lost or mishandled.
Find out more about automated meeting scheduling by using BookIt today to schedule your meeting with a LeanData representative!
