Taking bookings
online.
Why bookings by text and phone call cost a small freight business more than they look, what an online booking page has to do, and how to move customers across without losing any.
The cost of a phone booking
A booking by phone takes five minutes of the office’s time and five minutes of the customer’s, and at the end of it one person has the details and the other has to trust that they were written down right. A booking by text is worse: the details are in a thread on someone’s phone, the price was never mentioned, and the job is typed into the system from memory, later, if at all.
At twenty bookings a day that is most of a morning. More to the point, it is the morning of the one person in the office, who also has to answer the driver, chase the invoice and deal with the customer whose freight is late.
What an online booking page has to do
It has to carry your name, not a software company’s. It has to ask only for what you need: who, what, how many, from where, to where, when. It has to work on a phone, because that is what the customer has in their hand. And it has to tell the customer the price before they press send, so there is no conversation about money afterwards.
It should not create a job on its own. A request arrives, the office looks at it with the price and the run in front of them, and accepts it or declines it. Accepting turns it into a job on the right run. Declining tells the customer why. Nothing is on a run that the office has not seen.
Price up front
Most operators are nervous about showing a price before they have seen the freight. An estimate on the booking page removes the back-and-forth, and the customers who book online are usually the ones who already know what they are sending. The estimate comes from the same rate card the office would have used, with the fuel levy on it, so it is the price they would have been quoted on the phone.
Moving customers across
Do not announce it to everyone at once. Pick the three customers who book most often by text, give them the link, and ask them to try it for a week. Fix whatever they trip on. Then give it to the next ten. Keep taking phone bookings for the customers who prefer them; the point is to take the routine bookings off the phone, not to force anyone.
A tracking link on every accepted booking is what makes customers stay. Once they can see where their freight is without ringing, they do not go back to ringing.
How Nado handles it
In Nado your customers book from a page that carries your name, your services and your rates, and they see an estimate before they send the request. The request arrives in the office with everything on it and your price, and the office accepts or declines it in a tap. Accepted bookings become jobs on the run, the customer gets a confirmation and a tracking link, and regular customers can repeat a past booking in one tap.