TIMETRADE PROVIDES AUTOMATIC ON-DEMAND APPOINTMENT SCHEDULING
Reviewing the TESA Offering for Corporations and the New TimeDriver Solution for Individual Service Providers
By Ronni T. Marshak, February 7, 2008

NETTING IT OUT

For organizations and individual service providers whose livelihood depends on meeting with customers, time and money is often wasted on trying to schedule these appointments. TimeTrade provides an enterprise-level, rules-based appointment scheduling solution to eliminate phone and email tag and give customers the ability to self-schedule appointments via the Web or IVR systems 24x7. The product is available either as in-house installation or as a hosted on-demand solution.

The TESA product line, currently used in over 300 organizations, offers a high level of flexibility in defining hierarchical rules to maintain the schedules and interdependencies of resources. The complexity of the rules, however, is hidden from the organization’s users and customers, providing a simple interface for actually scheduling appointments.

On January 28, 2008, TimeTrade announced the TimeDriver family of low-end, relatively simple, self-service appointment scheduling tools, which can be used for free or for (anticipated) low cost. TimeDriver is a hosted on-demand service targeted for individual professionals or service providers who can use the ability to have prospects or customers “schedule now” to recruit, organize, optimize calendars, and make it easy for customers to do business.

The company has laid out a product evolution path for TimeDriver which will offer additional capabilities, filling in the “middle market” of appointment scheduling needs. Although TESA and TimeDriver are solutions for a specific challenge and are not designed to automate an entire business process nor to provide a complete solution to managing a business, organizations (large and small) and individual professionals or service providers, who spend too much of their valuable time playing the time negotiation game, will find the TimeTrade offers attractive and reasonably-priced.

TIME WASTED SCHEDULING TIME!

Time Is a Perishable Commodity

In an era where we talk (and, hopefully, do something) about wasting resources, there is one precious resource that sometimes gets overlooked. Time.

Time is not only a perishable resource (once an hour is gone, it’s gone forever), but it is also extremely valuable. In most businesses—even those that sell commodity products—time is also money. Say you sell a software product; you also need to “sell” (whether you charge for it or not) services such as customization, field maintenance, and, sometimes, in-person training. The people who do the customization and perform the repairs, and even the room in which the training takes place, are resources that have limited amounts of time—time which needs to be effectively scheduled to obtain the most value.

The Time Negotiation Game

One of the biggest wasters of time is the actual act of scheduling an appointment with a resource, be it a person, a facility, a piece of equipment, and so on. Although, in the world of email communications, telephone tag has been reduced, we are still playing the time negotiation game. You know the one. You want to schedule a time to talk to a professional such as a job counselor or lawyer; arrange an appointment with a service provider such as a massage therapist, tile installer, or dog groomer; schedule time on a specific piece of equipment such as an MRI machine or your gym’s recumbent bike.

The game is played like this:

There are many variations on the game: the resource owner can initiate the tag by offering their service (“it’s been three months since your last oil change; why not schedule now?”); if you’re lucky, you reach the right person on the telephone on the first try; or steps may be eliminated (e.g., in your initial email, you give your availability for an appointment). But, no matter how the game is played, there is a back and forth to negotiate the time when the customer will have access to the resource.

When the product that you sell is time, time spent playing negotiation tag is money down the drain.

Making a Schedule Work for You

Let’s look at the scenarios of what service and resource providers want.

SERVICE PROVIDERS/PROFESSIONALS. Individual professionals within practices (law firms, therapy practices, retail operations, etc.), not to mention the management team in charge of overseeing incoming revenue, all want pretty much the same thing: “I want a steady stream of clients to fill my work schedule without having to spend a lot of time filling the schedule.”

RESOURCE PROVIDERS. Operations that book resources such as A/V equipment or meeting rooms have a similar scenario: “I want to maximize the billable use of my resources without wasting a lot of time and effort on scheduling.”

PROFESSIONAL/RESOURCE TEAMS. The scheduling issues become more complex when there is a combination of resources to book, such as surgical teams with operating rooms or physical trainers with weight training equipment. The scenario for them is: “I want to schedule the right people, right equipment, and right location for the customer quickly and easily, based on situation requirements.”

Making It Easy for Customers to Arrange Appointments

For pretty much all customers, the scenario is the same: “I want to schedule an appointment quickly, at my convenience (e.g., at midnight), for a convenient time for me.”

Making Scheduling Information Transparent to All Parties

For professionals who “sell” their time, or a resource’s time, their schedule is their bible. They have to keep it up to date so that they know who they are meeting and when. They need to know what available time they have and, for complex, interdependent scheduling situations, they need to have access to the calendars of colleagues with specific skill sets, rooms with specific capacities, and/or specialized equipment.

These schedules are usually well maintained. But they aren’t typically visible to customers. Not that we’re advocating publishing your schedule of client appointments (or your roster of clients), but what about exposing your availability to customers so that scheduling doesn’t require negotiation? A customer can immediately see what times are available and then claim the appointment time that is best for them and their busy schedules.

TimeTrade, a Bedford, Massachusetts-based leader in rules-based appointment scheduling solutions, offers solutions to do exactly this.

TIMETRADE AUTOMATES THE SCHEDULING PROCESS FOR ENTERPRISES

Background on TimeTrade

Founded in 2000 to address the everyday frustration of scheduling an appointment, TimeTrade developed a solution to apply real-time, Web-based technology to the problem via an in-house installed or on-demand software as a service (SaaS) offering. The solution is designed to enable service providers to invite service consumers to schedule an appointment using rules- and constraint-based software to expose availability and mediate scheduling transactions. The 32-employee (and growing) company was built on revenues earned and modest angel funding. TimeTrade obtained series C financing of $5.3 million recently to expand the development, expand client services, and increase its outbound marketing efforts.

The TESA Solution

The company’s first offering, a turnkey system called the TimeTrade Enterprise Scheduling Application (TESA), was released in 2001. Currently, version 4.7 is being shipped and is covered in this report. Version 5.0 is under development, with customer-specific release to the first customer in May and general availability second half of 2008.

TESA is a real-time, self-service, multiple touchpoint appointment scheduling system. The product is designed for medium to large organizations that experience both relatively simple and complex scheduling challenges. According to the company, customers implement TESA to address six different opportunities:

Features of the Solution

SELF-SERVICE APPOINTMENT BOOKING. Customers can schedule appointments at their convenience, 24x7, via a Web site or IVR system. TimeTrade clients, such as Charles Schwab, Ritz Camera, and NJ Motor Vehicle Commission (see Illustration 1), have opened up self-service scheduling to customers.

Customers can also cancel or reschedule appointments via the self-service channels.

Self-Service Appointments at the NJ Motor Vehicle Commission

© 2008 NJ Motor Vehicle Commission

Illustration 1. New Jersey motorists can schedule road tests and inspections online, 24/7, by selecting the test they want and then specifying location by ZIP, city, or county. Based on configurable rules embedded in the system, the user is then shown a list of available locations. The system then presents a grid of available appointment times at that location when all the required resources are available (e.g., an inspector qualified for that test). A confirmation screen can be printed out to serve as a reminder, and confirmation and reminder emails are sent if the applicant supplies an address. Underlying the seemingly simple process is the TESA rules engine, which checks to ensure the license hasn’t been suspended, a new applicant has passed a written test, has had a learner’s permit for enough months, and so on (as defined by the administrator during the system configuration).

This report continues...

To read the full report: http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/pr02-07-08cc