Channelscaler is the product resulting from the combing of Allbound and Channel Mechanics. It is a cloud-based channel sales and marketing platform that allows organizations to give real-time access to sales enablement, marketing tools and resources in one mobile-friendly place.
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Checkfront
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Checkfront is appointment scheduling and booking software from the Canadian company of the same name.
$0
per month
Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Acuity Scheduling is an appointment management platform developed by the company of the same name in New York and acquired by Squarespace in 2019.
Allbound is a sleek solution that neatly organizes data. Clearly presents useful instructional content. The slowness of the CRM connection is a problem. When it comes to reaching out to our worldwide network of channel partners, we turn on Allbound to streamline our communication and sales enablement efforts. Our reseller partners may use this central hub to register new deals, stay up to speed on product changes, and have access to all relevant product information.
Checkfront is very intuitive and user friendly which makes it easy to train new seasonal staff quickly. We operate out of several different locations. Each outpost manager has the ability to go into checkfront and modify inventory based on their needs and availability, which makes communication easy and eliminates overbooking
The customer and inventory calendar views allow me to "play Tetris" with lodging assignments to optimize guest experience.
I think any business can benefit from Acuity Scheduling. In my experience, however, and maybe I just haven’t found the correct settings yet, it’s been difficult to manage 4 business schedules with multiple employees and varying hours that change day-to-day and week-to-week. So I definitely would recommend it to more simple business models with set hours, as it seems like it would have all the functions one might need. I still would recommend to more complex businesses like mine as well, but also include discussion of some of the potential drawbacks.
Content Management including sales & marketing resources, calendar items, distributor and partner communications, and news for partners
Deal registration and MDF management--providing an easy to use system for partners and Cambum administrators to enter and review requests.
Increasing partner engagement--providing an easy way to update the portal frequently keeps our partners coming back to see the latest and greatest resources and benefits
Clicking on the link opens up my calendar, which has an uncluttered look, making it easy for my prospects and clients to review their options and make their choice.
I am able to customize my schedule, the types of appointments I want to offer, and even decide how many appointments I want in a day. There are so many details that I can customize.
I can customize how my calendar and emails look for my prospects and clients so that I come across professional and coordinated. I want the look of my business, website, etc. to have a polished, cohesive, and interesting presence.
I love that there is a workshop/class/series option for my workshops. My attendees reserve their place and pay upfront. I can duplicate these events or add future dates. It's wonderful. This saves us a lot of time and is so convenient.
I haven't had any trouble with my scheduler. It works flawlessly, so I don't have to take time out of my day to fix, troubleshoot or call customer service.
I love that I can add questions for my prospects to answer right away before booking a call. This means 3 fewer steps for me. 1. They answer these questions without an email from me. 2. They make their reservation and get a follow-up email, right away. 3. I customized the follow-up email with more details and actions to take to prepare for our call.
The fact that you can't make payouts to partners within the platform itself is super frustrating and that would be a huge improvement.
The ability to track clicks, page views, etc is not available like on other partner platforms like Tune, Impact, and Cake. It would be awesome to see that tracking data for the content being shared.
Having more integrations with platforms like Zuora which we use for payments would be great.
Allbound is so easy to use as an administrator and provides human support and a resource for its customers to learn about the features and tools available. Our partners consistently provide feedback to us about how much they absolutely love our partner portal, which Allbound provides the structure and functionality to allow us to over amazing things to thousands of partner globally. Almost every person who provides feedback says some iteration of "this is the best partner portal i've ever used."
Acuity Scheduling has been very reliable. If you don't believe me, check out their status page here. They do a pretty decent job maintaining their app. To be fair, it's a pretty simple tool so they shouldn't run into too many hiccups given it doesn't feature near as many options as other applications on the market run.
It is by far the easiest system to administrator that I have either had experience doing or demoed from other vendors. No coding skills needed. Simple interfaces for everything. And the Allbound University and live support are great!
It is very easy to use once you get to know the program but with years of working with the program I am still finding new things that I had wished I knew about earlier. I feel like aspects of the website become hidden that would help productivity a lot if I knew they existed beforehand.
Allbound has a support team that is easy to contact right through the PRM interface. Additionally, we have a dedicated account manager and development team who are super responsive and helpful. Allbound has a ticketing system for support as well, which keeps you up to date on status of your support requests.
Every time I had a question on how to do something or had any issues with Acuity Scheduling, mainly in the very beginning, when I was learning the platform, customer service was excellent. They were prompt to respond, friendly, and very helpful until I had the right solution.
Regular meetings, lots of UAT, quick responses, and adherence to our timeline made implementation a breeze -- even though we had some really complex processes we needed to support.
They are different in the sense that Allbound allows you to loop in different parners to a degree that HubSpot doesn't outside smaller extensions and portals. More visbility into interactions with HubSpot, but it's truly built for marketing vs a sales forward/partnership management tool.Extensions from Allbound into Google could be helpful
In the case of Schedulicity, the system was awesome (very easy to set up and had some nice features) but did not offer the functionality and flexibility that AcuityScheduling does. In the case of SimplyBook.me, they offer lots of functionality but the interface is extremely complex and you pay a la carte for features so you're going to pay exponentially more for the same set of features as compared to AcuityScheduling. Their customer service was also lacking, in my opinion.
The sharing of knowledge has a positive effect on the partners who benefit from it.
Our smaller partners are now able to conduct their own campaigns with the help of our Campaigns in a Box, freeing us to concentrate on our larger clients.
Our latest products can all be better explained with the aid of our learning tracks.
