Chili Piper vs. Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company vs. Zoho Bookings

Chili Piper is GREAT for sales development teams booking for sales people. This is especially true when there is a "round robin" system that needs to be abided by. I've experienced a lot of bad round robin systems and Chili Piper's is fantastic. This is also a great tool to schedule with people across multiple time zones, which I don't want to have to focus on while speaking. It enables sales reps to focus on the prospect, not the time change. Chili piper would not be a good fit for underperforming sales teams that don't book any meetings (:

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I've tried some of the other online booking services and while there were good, they didn't have all of the features that Zoho Bookings does and since I'm already a Zoho One subscriber, it doesn't cost me anything more. I think virtually any type of business can use Bookings as it's not geared to a specific industry but can be customized for use in any type of industry. I would love to see salons use it as I think it can be truly a way for them to better book clients than using a paper calendar which I see many using. I also think massage therapists would also benefit but using Bookings. If you are a solopreneur or have a sales team, there's no way you can't benefit by using Bookings for your phone appointments, Zoom/Video meetings, or in-person meetings. There is also a resource function which allows you to block out conference rooms and other resources.

Incentivized

• Chili Piper integrates with Salesforce very well which I haven't seen other calendar apps do yet.
• Meeting Buffer functionality assures that AEs won't be booked back-to back.
• I can send the link to each of my meeting templates for different prospects

• 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.

Incentivized

• Global booking with automated time zone adjustments
• Booking payment management
• Synchronizing to Calendar
• Integrating with CRM

Incentivized

• They are continually improving their offering and we've seen great leaps over the past 2 years.
• Would be nice to be able to modify the email reminders for every single contact and event versus have set templates
• Faster load times, but we can’t complain too much!

• Administrator interface is tricky to use. It is not easy to add new types of meetings or edit the settings on the current types of meetings we have
• I'd like to see them send out more reminder emails leading up to the meeting scheduled to reduce the number of no-shows and reschedules
• Make it easier to customize the confirmation emails-- easier ability to add videos and customizable text

Incentivized

• Customization.
• Custom workflow automation.
• Robustness of features.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It still needs more robust features and customization, like workflows and such. I'm confident they'll continue improving it, but some particular customization settings aren't available, in terms of triggers, content, look and feel, but it is mostly very detailed and particular. If you're ok with adapting to it, it is an excellent tool.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Some of the integrations and features are harder to set up. Once everything is set up its fairly straightforward, but if like ATI you have multiple branches or departments utilizing Bookings, you would need to set up separate booking sites for each office/salesperson

Incentivized

• Support was very responsive during our integration phase, and after that too.
• They have the whole infrastructure built to notify customers about bug/outages, which is excellent. Entire System outage only happened once, but being updated on fix progress helped a lot to keep our team calm.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

A lot of things are not great as this is a new tool, but they fix it relatively quickly. They don't have a direct phone number, but Zoho support has good service overall

Incentivized

Calendly was being used at the company by some other departments and still is to some extent. However adding Chili Piper fore the marketing and sales departments was a no brainer once we saw the demo. It's Calendly on steroids and the company is just getting started using it. I'm sure we will see even more benefits as the years go on.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I found the integration with the two above is great if you're a Google Calendar user which we are not. While with Zoho Calendar we can have two way integration with Google Calendar there wasn't a need to do so. With Zoho Bookings which also integrates with Google Calendar we didn't have to worry about that as the integration with our Zoho Calendar was virtually automatic. There was also the cost consideration as the two above have a free version it was limited and didn't have all the bells and whistles we needed. Zoho Bookings provide us with everything from a single sign-on web browser and mobile app

Incentivized

• More demos held by simplifying the scheduling process. More demos = more opportunities
• Initial set up was frustrating and created a lot of mix up which allowed some leads to slip through the cracks early
• Integration with Salesforce.com saved our reps time because they didn't have to log activities manually

Incentivized

• Minimizing no shows
• Giving me back time by taking tasks off my mind/to-do list to focus on bigger more important things
• Payment management (it helps me make sure I receive my payments/recurring payments and follow up with clients if a payment has failed)
• Honestly just saving me from scheduling nightmares and headaches
• Timezones! It does it for you! (I work internationally)

Incentivized

• Organizational efficiency improved by 33%
• Conversion rate from bookings improved
• Increase in booking numbers

Incentivized