Acuity Scheduling is an appointment management platform developed by the company of the same name in New York and acquired by Squarespace in 2019.
$14
per month
Engageware
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Engageware (formerly TimeTrade) helps leading brands optimize engagement through all phases of the customer relationship. Engageware’s Intelligent Appointment Scheduling platform harnesses artificial intelligence to improve meeting scheduling strategies through real-time customer insights and actions, in order to produce better meetings, and higher growth. The vendor states that with Engageware, customers can outpace their peers by nearly 3X. They further boast tens of thousands of businesses –…
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.
It's well suited if you're on a budget, don't want to pay a recurring fee, and need a way to automate appointments. However, when I get around to it, I think I'm going to look for a more reliable tool. It's really less appropriate when appointment setting is "mission-critical" -- that is, your business is entirely dependent on a reliable appointment setting system -- for example, if you're a hairstylist, dentist, etc. I believe there are many other tools out there specific to these purposes.
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 find the interface to be a tad clunky and not that intuitive. I don't love the look and feel.
My goal was to use TimeTrade exclusively for prospecting calls, which I gave a specific name. (e.g. Fall back in love with your business coaching session). I scheduled these open appointments for specific time slots when I'm available. I was surprised to discover that people could schedule different types of appointments at any open time in my calendar, not just the time slots I prefer.
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.
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.
TimeTrade has been my favorite way (that I've discovered so far) to organize meeting attendees from different organizations and coordinate a time that works for everyone.
