What is massage therapy booking software?
For massage therapists and luxury service providers like spas managing bookings and appointments is critical. Massage therapy booking software is a tool that simplifies the booking, reservations, scheduling appointments, and communication with the client. Technically, massage therapy software integrates the client booking and management side with the business side into one process.
Reasons you need massage booking software for appointments in a pandemic?
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Time savings
Managing client bookings manually is cumbersome and inefficient. With multiple appointment touchpoints like calls, SMS, emails, walk-in clients, social media, or apps, consolidating appointment information can be a nightmare and time-consuming. With manual processes, overbookings, under bookings, and missed reservations are inevitable. Such occurrences make clients unhappy, and this is costly to the business.
With massage therapy business software, clients can book from multiple platforms. The information is integrated and categorizable by appointment sources like SMS, email, or phone call. This simplicity saves the massage therapist time. Instead of dwelling on administering client bookings, focus shifts to the core business of providing massage services
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24/7 booking of appointments
Massage therapy software is internet-based with calendar integration capabilities. They have advanced functions that enable real-time booking and scheduling. Smart scheduling ensures that booked slots are locked. An attempt to reserve a booked time gets automatically rejected, and the system suggests an alternative time. With Covid-19 movement restrictions, software reservations minimize walk-in bookings.
Massage business software works on multiple devices, both desktop, and mobile. This usability enables bookings anytime. Upon successful booking, massage business software sends alerts and notifications confirming or declining an appointment. The real-time notifications are sent in via emails, push notifications, and SMS.
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Minimizing contact
Massage therapy is a contact service. Covid-19 continues to wreak havoc globally, with over 130 million infections and deaths nearing 3M. One of the mitigating actions is social distancing. Minimizing physical contact is a catch-22 for services like massage therapy.
However, with massage therapy business software, therapy sessions are conveniently scheduled with minimal contact between the therapists and the client. For medical therapy, follow-up sessions can be part virtual, with physical visits limited to unavoidable ones. This hybrid therapy approach is possible by the use of the massage therapy software with SOAP (subjective, objective, action, plan therapy process factors) notes module
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Encourage pre-booking
In booking software, appointment confirmation and scheduling take place in a single step. With massage therapy software, clients can pre-book without much hustle. Such a feature is reassuring to clients because they attend the massage session with the surety that they have an appointment already.
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Take a look at your schedules and availability
Massage therapy business software comes with an easy view dashboard. In the calendar, you get summarized priority information like schedules and availability. Besides, date view filters by day, week, and month are possible. It is easy to review schedules and availability.
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Additional booking options
Traditional booking methods like SMS, phone calls, and walk-ins are limited in their deployment. Phone calls and walk-in clients are conveniently attended to during working hours. Massage therapy software with advanced capabilities integrates multiple booking touchpoints. Massage therapy appointments can originate from emails, website landing pages, Google My Business templates, and social media platforms.
Data from the additional booking option is seamlessly integrated with the massage therapy software. It can be categorized for analysis and to assess which platform is best to make appointments.
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Help in better marketing
Massage business software report functions are useful in generating managerial summaries. For instance, summaries pertaining to the source of a booking (SMS, email, social media) are fundamental in understanding the audience.
The audience can be categorized by demographics, location, type of treatment, and SOAP factors. After conducting a fine audit of the audience characteristics, the marketing copy, content, and strategies are targeted to the right segment and clients. This approach enhances the measuring of marketing efforts and attainment of marketing goals.
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Easily enforce policies
Massage therapy software is an end-to-end tool that seamlessly weaves in the client-side with the business processes. Disclaimers, waivers, and policies are embedded in the client booking process. Mandatory data, terms, and conditions are placed along with the booking process steps. The software blocks an appointment from getting completed if all REQUIRED sections are not filled out.
With massage therapy software, policy instructions that are met or unmet can be tied to certain automatic triggers (true or false conditions). For instance, a no-show penalty is automatically deducted against a client’s payment details.
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Adjust your cancellation policy
Appointments and reservations are functions of change. Things come up that merit adjusting an appointment or canceling it altogether. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, government directives limiting movement to affect bookings are now common.
With massage business therapy software, amending a policy is easy, whatever reason leading to booking cancellation. It simply entails adjusting sections of the policy that are affected. Further, with notification capabilities, policy changes are circulated to enlisted clients via the communication mode a client selected. This can be via an SMS with the policy change URL link, an email, or push notifications for apps.
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Make adjustments to your calendar
With the 24/7 booking capability, pre-booking, calendar views, and additional booking options functionalities, massage therapy software delivers all the necessary apparatus to smartly manage your calendar. Managing the business, attending to customers, and having time for social activities are all achievable.
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Stay connected
Massage therapy software offers a wide range of customer touchpoints. At every contact point, you get the opportunity to stay in touch with the customer. In a time where service differentiation is not easy, using the networking power of massage therapy software, you have a chance to waoh the client. Also, with social distancing, you remain in the mind of the client.
Massage therapy software captures, summarizes and generates integrated client data that allow a personalized engagement. The relationship becomes two-way, where you meet client needs and expectations with great precision and accuracy. In return, you get better results in business performance.
Conclusion
Appointments and booking management is fundamental yet not the core business activity for massage therapists. Since massage therapy is a contact service, incorporating massage therapy software to make reservations during a pandemic like Covid-19 is ingenious.
Several benefits accrue to using massage therapy business software. Contact is minimized. There is saving on time. Clients enjoy the convenience of real-time booking and timely communication. It is easy to manage the calendar and coordinate schedules. With the information gathered, marketing activities and content are formulated for the right clients and market segments.
