Main Industrial Maintenance Management Methods

04/08/2026
14:53

reading time : 2 min

Lucie Monnot

Content Marketing Manager

If you still believe that you can impose appointment dates and times that suit your company, be prepared for problems.

In 2021, customers are the ones choosing. You can easily meet this expectation without completely disrupting your operations. In fact, giving customers more choice can improve operational organization.

Appointment scheduling: what if you let your customers choose?

For a long time, customer visit, installation, delivery and inspection schedules were driven by the company’s internal organization.

The assumption was that, because the customer was the one making the request, they had to adapt to the company’s schedule.

Customers were often simply informed that an audit of their dealership, the annual servicing of their boiler or the delivery of their new sofa would take place on a specific day, during the morning, without any further details.

The customer was then expected to make themselves available, even if that meant canceling all their morning appointments or, in the case of an individual customer, taking half a day or even a full day off work.

If you manage appointment schedules, you know that this approach is outdated.

In both B2B and B2C environments, it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to impose a date on customers. You must offer increasingly narrow time slots, or even a precise arrival time, if you want to avoid technicians or delivery drivers finding no one at the customer’s location.

As a planner, this can be extremely frustrating. You spend your time calling customers to reschedule appointments, while your field teams become frustrated because their routes are constantly disrupted by these failures.

There is also the cost of unnecessary travel for your company.

Are you facing this situation? It is time to change your approach.

Follow the example of doctors

It is no coincidence that online appointment scheduling platforms are becoming increasingly popular among doctors and private dentists.

If you know doctors, they will tell you that they adopted these platforms for at least one of the following reasons:

Appointment management was taking up most of their administrative staff’s time, at the expense of other tasks that were becoming increasingly numerous.
Patients were increasingly likely to forget their appointments, forget to notify the practice that they could not attend, cancel at the last minute and then demand a new appointment “as soon as possible”. In practice, this often meant not the first available appointment in the doctor’s calendar, but the appointment that suited the patient best.
It was difficult to fill mid-morning and mid-afternoon slots, while the beginning and end of the day were heavily in demand.

This is very similar to the situation currently faced by companies that travel to customer locations, whether they deliver bulky items, carry out maintenance visits, perform property inspections or conduct energy assessments.

What do doctors observe after moving their appointment management to an online scheduling platform?

A significant reduction in no-shows and last-minute cancellations, thanks to systematic appointment reminders by email or text message 48 or 24 hours before the appointment, whether it was booked the previous day or several months earlier.
A more balanced schedule, thanks to the promotion of less popular time slots or slots that have just become available because of a cancellation.
A drastic reduction in the time spent by administrative staff scheduling, rescheduling, canceling and confirming appointments by phone and email.

According to a survey carried out in June 2020, more than 70% of healthcare professionals using these platforms reported being “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with these three benefits.

The survey did not examine patients’ opinions. However, it is reasonable to assume that this type of appointment scheduling, which was for a long time the only way to book COVID-19 vaccination and teleconsultation appointments in France, has become widely accepted and will become standard across all industries.

Why? Quite simply because it is practical and efficient, and meets a key expectation of today’s customers: having a choice and facing as few constraints as possible.

Let customers schedule their own appointments to increase engagement

By integrating an appointment scheduling platform into your website, you give every customer the ability to choose the available time slot that suits them best.

The simple fact that customers make the choice based on their own constraints creates greater psychological commitment than if the date and time had been imposed from above.

Automatic appointment confirmation and reminder messages by text message or email, together with integration into the customer’s personal calendar, reinforce this commitment and minimize the risk of forgotten appointments.

For an online appointment scheduling platform to be adopted by customers, it must be extremely easy to access and simple to use.

This means that it must be designed from the user’s perspective, rather than according to the company’s internal logic. It must also follow current interface and navigation standards.

The quality of Doctolib’s design and user experience is one of the reasons for its success.

Here are two additional recommendations for your appointment scheduling platform.

Do not require customers to download an application

Do not require customers to download an application to access the platform.

A mobile application is justified when interactions between the company and its customers are frequent or recurring.

This is not the case for the delivery of a sofa, and even less so for one-off services such as mandatory property diagnostics before a real estate sale.

A responsive website can work just as well.

Rather than customers, it is your mobile employees who need a mobile application that integrates appointment scheduling.

Make it easy to reschedule or cancel an appointment

Highlight the “reschedule or cancel my appointment” option on your platform and, most importantly, in the confirmation and reminder messages sent to customers.

The easier you make these actions, the more likely customers are to take the time to notify you.

Remember that rescheduling or canceling an appointment that a customer can no longer attend will always cost your company less than an unnecessary visit by a technician, inspector or delivery driver.

Much more than an appointment scheduling tool

Customers do not see, and do not need to know, that the time slots offered to them are pre-optimized according to criteria and parameters reflecting the company’s priorities.

This is the major advantage of integrating an appointment scheduling platform into Nomadia optimization solutions.

Through the dynamic connection between calendar management and the optimization engine, you can:

Encourage customers to choose later dates

Encourage customers to choose dates further in the future in order to smooth your teams’ workload over a longer period.

This is what our customer Allodiagnostic does. The company adjusts the price of its services according to how far away the selected date is and how precise the customer’s chosen time slot is.

It is often assumed that customers will always choose the earliest possible date. This is often true. However, if a significant discount is available, customers may be much more willing to choose an appointment in one or two weeks rather than the next day.

At Allodiagnostic, discounts can reach up to 35%. Customers may also prefer to free up time for a specific appointment rather than remain available for a broad time window such as “between 8 AM and 1 PM”.

Add value to short-notice interventions

Charging more for appointments selected at short notice is not unreasonable. This is what all emergency service companies do.

Urgent service creates additional costs for your company, so it is reasonable for the customer to pay a higher price.

A customer who is genuinely in a hurry will rarely object to paying an additional fee for a service they urgently require.

Increase route density

Increase route density by adding as many delivery stops as possible until the day before the route.

C Chez Vous, which manages home delivery for Cdiscount of parcels weighing more than 30 kilograms, initially provides customers with a delivery timeframe when they place an order.

Every evening, orders recorded during the day are processed by the Nomadia optimization engine. The system creates the routes and then sends each customer a more precise delivery slot by email, which the customer can modify if necessary.

With Nomadia solutions, you can quickly set up your own online appointment scheduling platform and configure it according to your needs.

This allows the platform to support your business, maximize your teams’ productive time and make life easier for your customers.

Editorial note: The source title refers to industrial maintenance management, while the article content focuses on customer appointment scheduling and field service operations. The translation preserves the supplied title and translates the article content faithfully.

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