I have built more than fifty websites for therapists and practitioners now, and if I could change only one thing about most of the sites I am asked to replace, it would not be the design. It would be that you can book on them.
Here is why, and it has very little to do with technology.
When people actually decide to book
Almost nobody decides to see a therapist at half past two on a Tuesday afternoon. They decide at ten in the evening, after a bad day, having finally admitted to themselves that they want some help.
That moment is when they are on your website. And what happens next decides whether you get the client.
If there is a booking button, they book. The decision they have just talked themselves into gets acted on while they still feel it.
If there is a contact form, they send a message, and then they wait. You reply the next morning, which is entirely reasonable. But by then the feeling has passed, they are back at work, and the reply sits in their inbox. Perhaps they answer, perhaps they do not. A good proportion do not.
Nothing about that is a failing on your part. It is simply that the gap between deciding and doing is where people fall out.
The phone tag problem
The other pattern I see constantly. Someone rings during your session, so you cannot answer. You ring back, they are at work and cannot talk. They ring again, you are with a client. Three days go by and neither of you has done anything wrong.
Meanwhile the person has almost certainly looked at two or three other practitioners, and one of them let them book at eleven at night without speaking to anyone.
The objection, which is a fair one
“I like to speak to people before I see them.”
Good. You should, and for a lot of the work you do it matters. But that is not an argument against online booking, it is an argument for booking the right thing.
Put a free fifteen minute phone consultation in the booking system. People book the call, not the session. You still have the conversation you want to have, you still decide together whether to go ahead, and nobody has spent three days missing each other.
It also filters gently. People who will not book a free phone call were never going to become clients.
What it looks like in practice
The systems I set up run through Calendly, which connects to whichever calendar you already use. Your availability comes from your real diary, so you cannot be double booked. When something is booked, it lands in your calendar and both of you get an email.
The parts worth getting right when you set it up:
- Buffer time. Fifteen minutes either side, so nobody can book you back to back and leave you no room to write notes or breathe.
- How far ahead. Stop people booking for tomorrow morning if you need more notice than that.
- A cancellation window. Twenty four or forty eight hours, stated plainly on the booking page so it is never awkward later.
- Your actual working hours. Including the days you do not work. The system will honour them absolutely, which is more than most of us manage.
Taking payment at the same time
You can ask for payment or a deposit when someone books. Whether you should depends on your work and how you feel about it.
What it does reliably is reduce people not turning up. Someone who has paid forty pounds arrives. Someone who has booked a free slot sometimes does not, and you have lost an hour you could have given to somebody else.
What it can do is put off people who are nervous, which for some kinds of work matters more than the no-shows do. There is no universal right answer here. It is a judgement about your own clients.
A middle path that works well: take a small deposit rather than the full fee, and say clearly that it comes off the price of the session.
The bit people underestimate
Online booking does not just win you clients. It gives you your evenings back.
No more checking whether anyone has emailed. No more the mental list of three people you owe a reply to. No more working out whether Thursday at four is free by scrolling back through messages. The diary fills itself while you are doing something else.
Practitioners tell me that this, rather than the extra bookings, is the thing they would not give up.
If your current site cannot do it, that is worth fixing whether or not you do it with me. If you want to talk it through, the therapist page sets out how I usually handle it, or just ring me.