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.
Hairdressers or massage salons, the places where they are too busy to take an appointment via the phone effectively. Places with high pace client walkthrough and multiple staff members. Timely is perfect for environments like that as it would assist in automating a huge part of the admin processes. In my experience using it for high-value services, [it has] proven to be a sales killer due to two main reasons: 1) Booking process taking so long, that a lot of clients change their mind or just call, as for the money that they are saying they are expecting better service. 2) Shows price only at the end of the process, which clients don't like, they want to know price upfront.
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.
Support is slow and not very knowledgeable. Taking into account that they work only UK time, makes it almost useless.
Users are taken through a very lengthy booking process that required a lot of information from them and gives a price only at the very end. Because of that, we have got only 5 bookings in 5 years. Majority of people preferred to book over the phone as it was too difficult.
Event/Class booking does not allow you to book more than 1 ticket at the time
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.
Timely is by far the most user-friendly and fun to use. It's got a great interface, works on iPads, and training is super easy for the team. Other software is clunky and takes too long to set up and train the team to use.
