Booker is a suite of business management tools for service businesses, giving them the ability to attract new customers, book appointments online, sell products & services, manage employees, and retain customers.
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Booker is a suite of business management tools for service businesses, giving them the ability to attract new customers, book appointments online, sell products & services, manage employees, and retain customers.
The first challenge I took on after joining Booker was to reduce the time required for a new merchant to begin using the product. At the time, every single new sale consisted of a live demo, custom-tailored contract, and a series of 4 weekly calls with an implementation specialist to get everything set up. Not only was the goal was to drastically reduce the time necessary to go live, but to ultimately provide a seamless experience where the product could be purchased and set up without any human intervention.
We began by talking with new customers, which led to an in-depth audit of the current Sales and Implementation processes. The goal was to trim down the initial experience to the bare essentials needed to set up basic functionality, and dive into different areas of the platform based on feature sets and value propositions from there.
We built a self-serve purchase flow and onboarding wizard to gather the four core objects necessary to begin using the basic features of the app (Hours of Operation, Employees, Services, and Workstations). By eliminating any element that was not absolutely required use the product, this effectively reduced the time-to-live from an average of 68 days to less than one day, in some cases as little as ten minutes.
After the onboarding process was complete, there was still a lot this a business needed to set up in order to get the most out of the software. We built an interactive checklist to serve as an introduction to the more advanced features, which guided them through the process of setting it all up.
This included features like Memberships, Classes, Packages, Specials, Loyalty Programs, and several others. It also included an ecommerce store to help them to order hardware like barcode scanners, cash drawers, tablet stands, card readers, etc.
Along with onboarding and configuration, our research uncovered two other significant bottlenecks in our Sales process. The process itself required a lot of time from our sales staff as there was no way for potential customers to sign up for the product themselves. This was especially true for multiple-location clients which required a custom contract.
We worked with Sales leadership and their Operations couterparts to develop 2 products to help with this: a self-serve signup process based on common feature packages, and a Contract Builder for the Sales team that would help them create custom contracts in a matter of minutes.
I started at Booker right around the time they were launching their first mobile apps for both tablets and phones. These MVPs needed a lot of work to bring them to feature parity with the desktop app, so I spent a good amount of time integrating the full feature set in to the mobile appications.
