An intuitive, rock solid service that's worth the cost but with some minor quibbles
Updated February 28, 2023
An intuitive, rock solid service that's worth the cost but with some minor quibbles
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Deputy
I use Deputy to manage schedules, leave requests, and sick time for a team of 6. There is only 1 location and no departments. This scheduler allowed me to automate the scheduling process for staffing a public library. Previously I used an excel file and printed sheets to share the schedule, I wanted an app-based solution that would sync with a calendar.
- Pushing out updates to the schedule very quickly.
- UI is easy to navigate for staff.
- Copy and paste scheduling is amazing.
- The manager side UI needs improvement to be more intuitive.
- I have difficulty syncing it to my outlook calendar.
- The app and desktop environment don't sync perfectly and sometimes I need to push updates from the app when I've already done them via a workstation.
- The billing process is annoying, I'd rather just pay once a year.
- At least 3 hours a month saved.
- Can plan in advance and have had less staff issues over vacation reservations.
I didn't give a legitimate chance to Teams because I was so invested in Deputy. If I had a guess I would assume the Deputy interface to be a bit less clunky than Microsoft products tend to be. Deputy just works solidly and I've had no major issues in nearly 3 years so it's hard to fix what isn't broken. I would need to invest at least a week to trial and experiment with teams to make a switch and it just doesn't seem worth it at this time.
Do you think Deputy delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Deputy's feature set?
Yes
Did Deputy live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Deputy go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Deputy again?
Yes
Using Deputy
6 - All staff use this app to help us with scheduling and workforce management.
1 - Only the manager facilitated the schedules, the other 5 staff were on user accounts.
- Schedule automation
- Timesheet preparation
- Managing Vacation time
- Managing shift swaps
- Tracking sick days overtime and banked time
- Managing work from home time
- Assigning projects
- Noting deliverable time dates
- I never used the timesheet integration before but would
- I never delegated shift change approval to other but would consider it
- Managing volunteers and as needed staffing with "open shift feature"
Evaluating Deputy and Competitors
Yes - Deputy replaced excel timesheets and calendars. But now Ive gone back to microsoft with the Teams app
- Price
- Product Features
Deputy changed the licensing terms half way through my 3rd year of using the product. It made integrations a bit trickier, and made it a lot more expensive than before. I should have evaluated the per user model more effectively because I was sometimes leaving folk off the schedule to save a few bucks, which is counter intuitive.
Deputy Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled -
My implementation was broken into: try it myself, try with 2 employees, then roll out to the entire team. There was a brief transition period where I was using both microsoft teams AND deputy at the same time whch doubled up the amount of work and synchronizing, but on the whole I think that deputy is such an intuitive piece of software that really anyone can figure it out in a matter of minutes. There isn't a lot that can go wrong for the team end user point. Once the accounts are set up and the invites sent out, I think everything was quite smooth.
The only real problem I had was that syncing it to your calendar was hit and miss, so we abandoned that mid implementation in the third phase and just relied upon staff checking the app directly for shifts.
- calendar sync didn't work
- some staff didn't use smart phones at the time and needed a non app solution
- one volunteer didnt have an email address and I needed to create one just to get it up and running
Deputy Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | Escalation required |
No I did not. Most often I was referred to the knowledge base for solutions, and when that failed I reached out directly for a chat with the team via the web applet. Resolutions never took more than a few days so I saw no need for a premium support level.
I don't believe anything was exceptional with Deputy in terms of support, but they are very good at responding to queries and bringing things to a resolution. A lot of times when I make inquiries and help desk tickets with adobe, my IT team, or quickbooks I get the feeling that they're trying to do as little followup as possible to close tickets fast, perhaps offering a link to a knowledge base or guide yourself style solutions. Deputy never felt that way with me when I had an issue with locked timesheets where I could not change things that occurred a month after approval in the scheduling module. Deputy is willing to hold your hand a bit and examine the issue. In a rare case they even did a teamviewer session with me to diagnose why firefox was loading errors on my schedule dashboard. In some cases vendors have just told me to switch browsers if I want a resolution, which is frankly a jerk move, and a desire to disregard user preference - I would never expect this from Deputy.
Using Deputy
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Technical support not required Quick to learn Feel confident using Familiar | Unnecessarily complex |
- assigning shifts
- prepopulating the calendar with their copy function
- timesheet exporting
- the app itself was pretty slick
- when shifts get locked after a period of time
- deleting a staff member
- trying to remove locations, shift details
- updating shifts via the app versus the web wasn't always reliable
Yes - The mobile interface was hit and miss for me. I used it frequently when after hours to make quick shift swaps but I was never confident that my team was getting the updates so I frequently had to follow up with a text. to make a giant schedule for a whole month I would say that the mobile interface is fairly useless since there's would be a lot of monotonous data entry that would take less than a quarter of the time if you had a proper mouse and keyboard setup.