Everyday use is good enough, we don't have an overly complicated product that allows us to complete the tasks given to us and schedule and reschedule the meetings. The ability to allow the user to control the scheduling of meetings and look in the calendar for specific timelines has never been easier. The stress that is on the user is taken away from the user by the tool itself.
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.
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.
I would like the ability to search the schedules of all tutors for the next available opening.
When scheduling a provider off for a day or if the provider is sick, I would like the program to ask me if I need to cancel all appointments for the provider and allow me to give a message to the client why it is being canceled.
Office closed messages. - If I close the office for a week because of vacation, spring break, etc... I would like Schedulicity to cancel all the appointments on the specified dates and give me the option to send a message to my client's explaining why we are closed. Currently, I need to go into each individual provider and mark the days off and then go into each provider's schedule and cancel each appointment. It takes a long time to do this with 14 employees. It would be easier to indicate the business is closed, cancel all provider's appointments on those days, and then have an option to send a notification to clients indicating why the center is closed.
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's just very intuitive once you get the hang of it, which won't take long. They try not to make complex things very complex and they provide explanations for everything with a greyed-out question mark icon next to the function. Also, I love that they encourage people to just get live help when they need it.
The support team is awesome. The turnaround is quick and if the software cannot support my current need they are really good about giving me a work around.
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.
This is night and day from the excel spreadsheets we were using to set appts manually. We have seen productivity and scheduling mistakes diminish quickly. Very happy with this product.
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.
