Before founding Full Slate, Chris was working full time, leading a busy lifestyle with a busy schedule. Making appointments for personal services like a haircut or massage was always a challenge. With a day full of meetings, it wasn't convenient to get on the phone during the workday so she usually tried to make appointments for personal services after hours. She recalls leaving a lot of voicemails, not always hearing back, and missing out on preferred appointment times once she did. The phone tag was a real obstacle to getting an appointment scheduled.
This is when it occurred to Chris that small businesses, especially those that didn’t have the luxury of dedicated phone staff, were probably losing out on a significant amount of business. With a background in online marketing she felt that service providers who have a website aren’t getting full value if their clients still have to pick up the phone. Consumers are beginning to expect that they can do everything on the web and they really want to be able to schedule appointments online too. So Chris decided to make it her mission to help small businesses serve their clients better by enabling easy and affordable online appointment scheduling.
After looking at some of the scheduling software that was already on the market, Chris and her team noticed that many of the existing solutions were un-intuitive and hard to use. Small businesses need to focus their time and energy on providing great service and taking care of clients, not figuring out how to use some software. So the Full Slate team set out to make the friendliest possible scheduling solution - for both businesses and their clients. For example, one drawback with some of the existing solutions is that clients of a business need to register and create and account before they can schedule an appointment. Recognizing that many clients would be turned off by this extra step, Full Slate chose to make registration optional for the clients. One more challenge the Full Slate team observed with the other solutions was that they were simply unattractive. To quote Chris directly “If I am a business and I offer online scheduling for my clients, I want this to be something that looks good, that I am proud to show my clients.”
Full Slate released the first version of its web-based scheduling software to the public in early 2009. The company chose to focus specifically on the Health and Alternative Medicine providers - like Massage clinics, Hair Salons, Acupuncture and Chiropractic clinics – wanting to do a great job for these businesses before considering others. Their strategy seems to be paying off handsomely. Chris shared with me that there has been more than a handful of users that have offered to start paying for the service even before the end of the trial period. Now that’s a testament that users are getting a lot of value from the software!
Chris says most businesses that sign up for Full Slate find that after a few months, up to 70% of their appointments shift to being booked online, which translates into huge time savings. There was one client, an acupuncturist, that had actually begun to resent her clients because she was so stressed with the administrative aspects of the practice. Full Slate completely alleviated her stress. In an email to Full Slate, the acupuncturist raved about how she went on vacation and upon returning, had lots of new appointments that her clients had booked online through Full Slate.
Another thing that users often say about Full Slate is that it feels “Mac like”. That’s a serious compliment because Apple does a great job of making software easy to use and it means something to be compared to Apple. The team at Full Slate prides itself on providing personalized customer support and tries to talk to every new business that signs up. This really makes a difference and re-assures the small business owners that there are real people at Full Slate, available and willing to help if and when there are any questions.
So what should you do if you are intrigued and wanting to learn more? Just go to their website and sign up for a free trial of online scheduling. The trial is not time-based. Rather it lets you explore and test all features fully and you can use the software for free up to the point where 10 clients have booked online appointments. After that, there is a very affordable plan to keep using the software. This is a nice way to try out online scheduling because when you see your clients actually using it, then you truly grasp the value of the software. Full Slate also offers a live tour for a fictitious massage clinic at http://massage.fullslate.com. So, without sounding like a broken record, if you have ever considered online appointment scheduling for your clients, now you have no excuse NOT to do it. If you do try out Full Slate, come back and share your experience on this blog!
All the best,
Larisa Goldin,
Find Touch Co-founder
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