Betting that personal adoption of software applications often drives their use in business, TimeTrade Systems (DEMO 08) will offer in late July the first, free "bite-size" version of its enterprise scheduling software, called TimeDriver, to consumers who want to stop volleying emails and telephone calls to set up business and personal appointments.
Sounding like a blackjack player, TimeTrade's chairman and founder Marco Petersen said, "We're going to double down our effort by empowering individuals."
Translation: give away TimeDriver to individuals who will use it on the job with their Microsoft Outlook or Google calendars, and (hopefully) they advocate their company IT departments buy TimeTrade's enterprise version that supports the scheduling of thousands of appointments per month across multiple locations.
Peterson expects "both products could co-exist in the enterprise. The personal product is a great way to spread the gospel of self-service appointment making and will attract enterprises."
TimeTrade's enterprise product is already being used by more than 300 businesses in financial services, retail, healthcare, government, and education including foreign consultants in the U.S., Eli Lilly and Company, the Mayo Clinic, Charles Schwab, PETCO, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and Harvard University. The company also has ambitious plans to integrate its products more with salesforce.com (DEMO 2000).
"We moved to a self-service scheduling model with TimeTrade to provide better service to our applicants and to enable our staff to work more efficiently," said Jose Manuel Gil Osle, director of the Foreign Consulate of Spain in Los Angeles, CA. "More than 80 percent of our (visa) applicants now schedule their appointments online, which allows us to allocate our resources better. Additionally, the reminder email sent from TimeTrade ensures that applicants show up to their appointment with the right paperwork. The visa application process is immensely streamlined now and applicants typically are in and out within 20 minutes, while previously it could take hours. TimeTrade even automatically notifies the applicants when the visas are ready and approved."
Jim Dickie, managing partner of CSO Insights of Boulder, CO, said businesses are looking for software applications that can give back time to sales people. Revenue-generation studies show that the percentage of time a sales person actually sells any kind of product has decrease to less than 34% of their work time because across all industries sales people are doing more administrative work and much less selling to customers, Dickie said. In a survey CSO did of businesses this year, 88.5% said it takes at least three appointments to close a sales deal and the email and telephone volleying is dragging out the sales cycle.
"We're bullish on anything that provides digital assistance to sales reps because "liveware" doesn't exist. TimeTrade's enterprise product could become part of other types of sales automation systems like salesforce.com or customer relationship management systems - they are a perfect candidate for a mash-up."
So far, TimeTrade has no direct competitors, Dickie said. CRM applications, such as Siebel and Pivotal and vendors such as Appointment-Plus and AppointmentQuest, "do an OK job sharing calendars inside a company but I haven't seen any of them do a really good job scheduling customers' appointments. It's a very complex problem."
The Bedford, MA transactional software company is learning that jumping into the "Web 2.0" pool means learning rapid prototyping and new ways to market virally. Since introducing the TimeDriver beta product in January at DEMO, the company has made major improvements to the personal product every one to two weeks compared with its old pattern of upgrading its enterprise product every four months.
TimeTrade is positioning itself for a natural market tipping point to occur - the time when scheduling appointments for consumers is a frontline problem and service businesses like medical, hospitality, and leisure turn to automation for help, Peterson said. Self-service grocery check-outs and gasoline pumps have paved the way. Peterson estimates that the mainstream use of automatic scheduling by consumers is three to five years away. One early adopter of self-service scheduling is the photo studio industry. Target, Wal-Mart, Sears, JC Penney, and Ritz use TimeTrade to let consumers schedule family portraits and other photo shoots.
Already some high-profile companies around the world are moving to self-service scheduling to reduce costs and improve convenience.Anticipating an eventual global self-service scheduling need, TimeTrade products can reconcile the world's 293 time zones.
Peterson is hopeful that people sick of phone and email tag will adopt a new game plan. "We might," he says eagerly, "have a tiger by the tail."
