THE CLIENT:
Our client is a small business owner in the pet care space offering dog grooming services with several locations in one metro area.
THE BUSINESS NEED:
The global pandemic quickly changed the way businesses worked with their customers and highlighted the need for technology to make life easier and safer for customers and employees. For this client, taking reservations had always been a manual process with customers calling or stopping in to set up appointments. Each size and breed of dog needs different time and care, making off-the-shelf reservation systems designed for people salons or restaurants just not the right fit for this business. They needed a custom pet reservation system that would be easy and fun for customers to use and simplify life for their employees.
WHAT GENECA DID:
To fully understand the client’s needs, Geneca examined the current processes for booking appointments, looked at the employee cheat sheets and calendars, and listened to the frustrations and wishes of the staff. Working with the team, we were able to identify a first release with function and fun.
For customers, we designed and built a mobile and web parent portal with three main areas:
- Profile section to keep track of each pet’s vet and shot information, show past grooming history with pictures, and allow easy ways to add a new dog or change information.
- Booking section where with just a few taps a customer can search and select an upcoming appointment at their favorite location using their desired shampoo with their preferred groomer.
- Status section where pet parents can watch the progress of their pet’s appointment and confidently run errands knowing where their pet is in the process and get a text when it is time for pickup.
For employees, we built tools to:
- Allow management to easily schedule groomers
- Provide increased scheduling control to groomers
- Give employees better visibility into their day
- Simplify the workload of the employees
Some groomers prefer to work on many dogs with smaller nail trim and bath appointments while others like to have a few longer grooming appointments for dogs with more complicated needs. Giving the groomers control of their day required a complex algorithm to match the customer searches with the groomer availability—all in sub-second searching.
The shift from a traditional block calendar, to a list-based calendar system with multiple views lets employees easily see any groomer’s schedule for a day or week between all the different locations. Tapping any row in the calendar list opens that appointment, which keeps all the work progressing smoothly from check in through grooming and photographing to final checkout.
Allowing employees access to the same schedule search that customers use eliminated the need for those cheat sheets listing groom times per dog by size while also providing override options when needed. Additionally, we created a series of emails that are sent automatically to remind customers of appointments and to update shot records, thereby removing this work from the employee’s to-do lists.
Management loved the easy solution to accessing and changing the important data for the business. If they need to change prices, add new products, or even change the time required to groom a specific breed of dog, the simple to use manager pages allow them to make the adjustments for one or all salon locations. Adding and training new staff is also easier than ever with the new customized system.
THE RESULTS:
Currently, the new system includes several thousand users with hundreds of appointments scheduled. Training the existing and new staff was simple and effective. Employees love how easy it is to take a picture at the end of grooming and add it to the parent pet profile so they can reopen the pictures for discussion at the next appointment. This serves to further improve communication and provide the customer with grooming that meets their desires.
The business owner loves the new system and has already completed a second release! This latest release added a special screen set to cast to a TV so the employees can see which dogs are currently in the facility and their status. It shows both dog picture and name so they know exactly what is happening at a glance. This means they don’t need to leave the front desk and seek out information, resulting in faster customer service.
Overall, the business owner was surprised to find that creating custom software was less expensive than using an off-the-shelf product with “small” user fees when he added up the total cost for 2 years of use. Now he has exactly what his business needed, better performance, and can make additions to functionality whenever he wants. Custom software saves him time and money while delighting customers and employees.