HoneyBook vs. Kustomer

I would recommend Honeybook to other coaches, consultants, and small business owners. It may not be appropriate for a large team's use, but works for the size of organization I currently own and manage. It also integrates with QuickBooks and makes financial data management fairly seamless.

Incentivized

I would say the greatest strength of Kustomer is its flexibility. In the hands of a skilled admin, it can be adapted to tons and tons of different use cases. I've been able to make custom displays for different groups of agents, produce complex cross sections of users, draw interesting data relationships combining marketing contacts and customer-initiated contacts. For example, there's really no other data source in our company which could tell you which users received a specific promo code and checked out with it, received their delivery within 14 days and then can related that to the number of times they contacted us about using our product. At the intersection of communication, marketing, data, and relationship-management, Kustomer shines at the center. I would say it falls short when you are trying to coordinate multiple "side conversations" with multiple sources to resolve an issue. This is a tough task for any type of platform, but if you're maintaining 3 different email chains with a 3PL partner, the customer, and a separate internal conversation, it would be confusing anyway!

Incentivized

• HoneyBook offers incredible resources to train users how to best use their system. It's informative and eye-opening to watch one of their training sessions.
• I love how easy HoneyBook makes it to create highly professional materials that are beautiful. Its brochures and selling materials are stellar and I'm able to streamline the process without feeling like I actually have to sell my capabilities.
• I'm thrilled with the billing system and how simple it is to automate. I love that I can see how my customers have engaged with the bills.
• The app helps me feel connected to my leads and data while I'm away from my computer.

Incentivized

• All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
• The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
• We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.

Incentivized

• The online scheduling tool does not work with different time zones very well. It doesn't automatically adjust to my clients' timezones and it doesn't even have many international time zones as an option! I had 3 clients in a row schedule meetings at the wrong time when I first started using HoneyBook's scheduler. I had to switch to Calendly because HoneyBook's scheduling tool was causing me to lose business.
• The transaction fees for instant deposits are expensive.
• [I believe} many of the features on HoneyBook are half-baked. It's marketed as an all-in-one business management platform, but I'm still using Calendly, Google Drive, Typeform, Clockify, and ClickUp because HoneyBook's equivalent features aren't as sophisticated or as easy to use.
• The notes section for client projects does not have much space or allow for any custom formatting such as hyperlinks, bold text, highlighted text, etc. Tools such as Teamwork, Pipedrive, Asana, and ClickUp do a much better job at displaying this type of information.

Incentivized

• For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
• Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
• Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
• I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.

Incentivized

Since I do not use ALL the functionality in HoneyBook, I have wondered if the plan I am on is too much. That is why I rated a 9 rather than 10. I have definitely considered downgrading but not leaving HoneyBook.

Because there's no other tool like Kustomer

Incentivized

This is now a copy-paste response since this platform is asking me to answer every single question. It is such a negative experience with Honeybook that they even upset me while I'm trying to warn others of all the horrible pitfalls in working with the platform.

There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.

Incentivized

Because Kustomer is available when you need it

Incentivized

Because ages load quickly, reports complete in a reasonable time frame, given their complexity

Incentivized

They have ALWAYS been amazing when I needed any type of service or help. Their concierge service is also amazing vs other services I have used in the past. I have confidence when I ask for help - both through Chat or even on their Facebook group that I will get an answer quickly.

Incentivized

I did not reach out to Kustomer support when we had an issue. Still, whenever we provide feedback to our manager regarding what can improve based on our experience using Kustomer, our manager always comments that Kustomer support always replies with some positive feedback based on our suggestions.

Incentivized

Because they are very hands-on in training us and very approachable

Incentivized

It was very easy to understand.

Incentivized

Nothing really because it is easy to use. After an hour of using it, we're already getting the hang of it.

Incentivized

Honeybook and Dubsado have a lot of similarities. I'd say the only big difference is that Dubsado still has more advanced workflow capabilities. Dubsado also is much harder to set up. Honeybook is simpler and easier to use right from the start.

Incentivized

Apps like Intercom, Zendesk, and Gorgios all treat customer inquiries as tickets, just tracking that one issue or interaction with a customer. Kustomer treats each customer as an individual, which allows us to provide top-notch customer service. Customers love that we're able to be more conversational and informal, while still solving their issues quickly. It also helps us build relationships with customers and increases repeat orders.

Incentivized

Because customer is flexible and scalable

Incentivized

• HoneyBook was very cost effective which was great for ROI!
• HoneyBook was easy to use which made for a quick employee on-boarding for new team members.
• HoneyBook had some features that were not available on the platform that are considered standard for any other CRM such as data pull, platform integrations, and customization options.

Incentivized

• We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
• Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.

Incentivized