As some of you know Nikki and I also own a personal and group training studio and we of course use Volo studio scheduling software to manage it, after all it is the very reason we built it. Last week I was sitting at my desk trying to look busy when I received phone call from one of our training clients. My reception said they had a compliant. Right away I was crap what did we do wrong? “Barry!” she says “I just went on to this scheduling software you use and I need to say something to you. It is fantastic! I just love using this. I can see everything I want right here from home and do not need to call you and bother you during your busy day.” Now the irony that she was talking to me on the phone during my busy day was not lost on either of us.

The point here is that she was so excited to be able to participate in our company from home, she felt connected enough to phone me and tell me about it. This is a huge thing in a service business. You need to be accessible and you need to engage your clients enough that they want to connect with you daily.  Using studio scheduling software empowers your clients to feel more like a part of your business and can set you apart from the others companies around you.

When we first opened up our studio scheduling software to allow our members access to book appointments, cancel appointments, purchase new packages we were a bit nervous! The concept of letting clients take their schedule into their own hand... YIKES! The great thing about our studio scheduling software is that we can control what the clients are allowed to do, how far in advance they can book and cancel their appointments, what shows up in the store for them to purchase and we can block our time off so they don’t book appointments when we need to be doing our own workouts.  Once we got used to that we realized that the member portal actually freed up valuable time for us – no more telephone/text tag to confirm appointments!

The complaint part from our client, well she has been training with us for almost 10 years and we have designed our studio scheduling software in 2003, she was upset that I didn’t “force” her to use it earlier.

Have you had any client experiences when using studio scheduling software? Please share them with us.