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Get Booking With Booxi

Pet Age Staff//October 13, 2015//

Get Booking With Booxi

Pet Age Staff //October 13, 2015//

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By Stephanie Braun

Your pet supplies store sells high-quality products—something you take pride in. Your product offering is key and so is the exceptional service you strive to provide. Many pet stores extend their business beyond traditional retail and offer services such as grooming, training and medical clinics. Too many, however, are late in adopting and using new technology.

According to Animal Kingdom USA owner Patrick Yates, many retailers in the pet industry aren’t up to speed on the latest retail tech trends, operating on gut feeling rather than making decisions based on real data.

“Store owners often tell me that they have great instincts and that they know their business intimately by virtue of being on the floor every day,” Yates said. “But they don’t know which product sits on the shelf longer than three weeks, which customer buys the most product or their sell-through figures by brand.”

It’s why so many pet stores are currently turning to progressive point of sale systems to help them upgrade their inventory and marketing strategies. For stores that offer services like grooming, many are only now discovering ways to improve their service through new uses of technology.

Enter Booxi, the easy-to-use app that makes scheduling appointments easier and more efficient.

“Booxi is an extremely inexpensive way to automate your booking system, and let me tell you, you want to automate in order to cut back on a huge amount of time,” Yates said.

The old-fashioned “hair salon” scheduling system just doesn’t cut it anymore, especially for busy retailers. Booxi allows clients to schedule appointments online themselves, saving them from calling and waiting on hold and possibly taking down the wrong information (or losing that little scrap of paper where they have their appointment written). It’s as simple as clicking a tab on your store’s website and booking a time slot with the groomer. Both the customer and manager get an automatic email reminder and the retailers can see a clear calendar of each appointment. While many clients like booking from their smartphones, some still prefer to call in—both options are possible with Booxi.

There are other online booking systems, but Booxi offers a service that is above and beyond the digital version of a manual agenda. Groomers can enter their availabilities into the calendar so that managers and customers can easily pick days when they’re working. Clients can enter the exact service they need, allowing the store to prepare in advance. Because it’s hosted on the cloud, a manager or groomer can see the entire schedule on their own device no matter where they are.

More than making communication more efficient (abolishing the need for people to call back and forth to verify with the physical book), Booxi gives retailers invaluable data with easy-to-read reports.

“With the click of a button, I can see how many small dogs we groomed this month versus big dogs,” Yates said. “I can see which services are the most popular or which days are the slowest. Imagine, in less than a minute, I can see that Tuesdays are my slowest day for example, and know that I should offer a promotion for that day. Can you do that easily by looking at pages of paper? Even with a digital calendar, it can’t quantify that kind of data.”

Moreover, Booxi seamlessly integrates with lightspeed retail point of sale, making it easier to ring up clients. The client’s name and service appears at the register, allowing for better customer relationship management.

“Since we started trying out Booxi, our cancellations have dropped because our customers get automatic reminders. It’s also much easier to pay the groomer’s commission because all of that information is in the system.”

Clear your desk of big, floppy spreadsheet books and grubby little pencils—the future of booking services is here and it’s easier to use than you think. To find out more about the full capabilities of Booxi, check out Booxi.com.