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.
YouCanBook.Me has made it really easy to schedule calls with applicants and with team members scattered across the world. We use it a lot to schedule follow up calls with potential leads from conferences and other recruiting events, which has been really key in converting leads from those events, and we direct applicants for our internship and staff positions to YouCanBook.Me to schedule interviews. We also use it to schedule calls with team members internationally. It is most useful for scheduling a call between two participants.
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.
Allows a prospect flexibility in choosing a time to meet
Saves me a lot of time with followup phone calls to book a spot
I can choose the times I am available for each day
If I block off time in my Outlook calendar, it blocks it off in YouCanBook.Me as well, so if there is a one-off time I cannot meet, I can just block it in my calendar instead of going into my YouCanBook.Me account
We loved the old version of youcanbook.me. Once they updated the site and functionality, we hated it. We kept reverting back to the old version, but now we cannot use the old version anymore. The new version has made it much slower to set up a new profile and fill in all of the reminders.
If they made it faster to populate a new profile by limiting repetition, that'd be awesome. We have to edit the titles of calendar events, emails to us, emails to participants, etc.
Working with Google calendar is sometimes frustrating, but they've recently updated it to make it easier for us to duplicate calendar events. Youcanbook.me syncs with Google calendar, so making all of the calendar events set to "Free" (previously, "Available") is pretty annoying.
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.
Acuity's user interface was much cleaner and easier to use when scheduling meetings. We love that you can embed it within your own website and it shows the calendar right there instead of redirecting you. Acuity gave us the ability to customize our meeting types and the information collected from the person scheduling the meeting.
Youcanbook.me is a pretty unique service, but some others have come up since we started using it in 2015. There´s some competition like simply book or roomzilla, but he haven´t considered them because they aren't as cost-effective or simply haven't found a need to do it yet. Folk at youcanbookme have given us great user support and have many benefits for the educational sector, which make it hard for competition because we are pretty happy with their service :)
