I think it's appropriate for everyone that meets with customers, meets with people within their businesses. I even put my personal calendar on my work calendar. I'm just looking at it every day, so I think everyone could use it.
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.
Enables users to set their "working hours" and others can see if they are setting up a meetings a moon symbol next to their name to show it is outside of that invitees working hours
Allows you to easily create scheduled tasks directly on your Google Calendar
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 booking page is really helpful for external people who want to chat with me, but so few people use it, that it makes it more frustrating. The solution exists but nobody is using it. It needs to be highlighted more
You have to switch between email accounts or set up additional calendars to schedule work events vs personal events
integrations with other calendars don't update quickly, so sometimes a coworkers vacation doesn't show up in the calendar until much later
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.
The platform itself is pretty user friendly even if you don't have a technical background. You can easily schedule meetings, block out focus time, update your time off, and add meeting notes. The settings are easily mapped out in terms of functionality and if you need help you can easily search for an answer on Google search
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.
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.
Most of the other services we would use don't have the same integration with other Google services that Google Calendar has. The ability to view and set things from your email is very convenient. So is the ability to have your notifications automatically show up on an Android phone as a reminder.
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.
