Online Booking is the Future—Now!

According to an Accenture forecast, by 2019, 66 percent of health systems will offer patient self-scheduling, and 64 percent of patients will choose this option as a way to book their appointments.  In today’s competitive marketplace, not offering your patients the option to book online might send them to your competitors. A 2015 survey conducted by the marketing firm Yodle concluded that 60 percent of consumers want the local businesses they frequent to provide online booking, and one-third say they expect it as an offering.

Implementing online booking isn’t scary or difficult, and if you use a marketing and customer communications platform like the MDA-endorsed Demandforce, this feature comes ready to use. Online booking can be added to your Yelp page, directly to your website, and your Demandforce Local page, so that new customers can request or book appointments immediately after they find you online.
This is helpful because over 42 percent of online bookings happen after business hours, and the majority of customers polled in a recent marketing survey stated they would rather make an appointment online than by phone. Offering online booking not only extends your potential reach for new customers, but it offers your current ones the convenience and features
they want.
If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of online booking, and how Demandforce integrates it with its other customer communications solutions for your practice, visit mdaprograms.com or call Demandforce at 800-210-0355 and let them know you are an MDA member.