SimplyBook.me is actually well suited for product/service based business which require one to one involvement with clients or prospects or if the users need support. SimplyBook.me comes really handy for booking the concerned person's time slot as per their availibility or open time, both parties can see their availibility and connect/sync accordingly.
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.
Schedule delay for beyond a day because there are times when I want to book beyond 3 or 4 days but I have to instead remember to come back before 1 day to set the reminder.
Confusing to pay for different features because many times I have found it unclear what features will be available to a paid user and what still will need to be paid for.
The interface is not easy, it takes time to adjust to things and find the options you find, navigation becomes relatively easier once you get the hang of the app.
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.
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 software works far better for this specific industry when placing candidates in the medical field. The reason why is client information for companies and candidates is important to provide to each party. Calendly does an okay job at this but the integration could use work. EngageBay has a lot of other tools and isn't primarily a calendar tool but the calendar has basic features we used.
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.
In around an hour or so, I have been able to solve my worries about getting paid, organizing my time, leaving me the time and energy to teach and to concentrate on promoting my business.
It's allowed me, in one stroke, to move forward my plans to add native-speaking language tutors to engage in follow-up courses.
