Acuity Scheduling, a Squarespace company vs. Zoom Phone

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 think it works well for offices that have multiple locations. Being able to give each person and office their own extension makes it easier for colleagues to connect with each other, plus it's a costs savings for each of the offices

Incentivized

• 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

• Having our Phone system all in onc place. Call, Text, Voicemail. with live transcript
• Zoom Meeting AI companion - taking notes, creating action items, and summarizing the meetings then email immediately afterwards
• Scheduler - being able to send links to team members or vendors to book a time that works best for them that is linked and synced to my calendar.

Incentivized

• 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

• We needed to link each of our team members' personal emails to the Zoom account so we have to filter VM notifications out of our personal accounts.
• It'd be nice if you could set business hours through the webpage to include a lunch break so that you don't have to manually go in to edit.

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

Integrated into our network. System wide access. Staff are comfortable with the product

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

Zoom Phone has a very sleek design which makes it very easy to operate and use both in the setting up of and interacting in a meeting space. That being said, certain features can seem a bit crowded while trying to screen share or display video which somewhat defeats the purpose of the application as compared to a standard conference call.

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

I haven't had any sort of issues with Zoom as of yet to have to call Support. That right there makes me think it's a good product. Simple and easy to use. Nothing confusing or glitchy that would make me have to get in touch with them. Straightforward so I'm not trying to figure out a specific workflow.

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

The main reason why we switched to Zoom Phone is because our VOIP system inexplicably went down for almost a month and no one could figure out what was wrong. Lumen was charging way more than Zoom Workplace, but could not get the system to work.

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

• Calls actually come through, resulting in our users trusting our phone system again
• Improved internal communication
• Users can be reached anywhere, so they do not have to stay at their desk to wait for important calls
• Voicemail is processed faster because it is translated to text

Incentivized