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.
If a person schedules a lot of meetings or simply has trouble managing a calendar, x.ai is phenomenal. That's especially true if the majority of meetings are internal since those meetings can be scheduled automatically. Even if you don't use Amy and Andrew, the calendar functionality is a great addition. Whether it's better than Calendly is more debatable, but combined with the other features of x.ai, it gives more ways to do calendar management. If a person needs to focus a lot on the interpersonal relationship with clients, x.ai may not work as well. It can feel like an impersonal way to handle scheduling, moreso than passing someone off to an actual human assistant.
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.
Since I am based out of Japan, adding Japanese language functionality would definitely be good for me.
Would like the ability to forward emails to Amy and Andrew and asking them to set up meetings based on the content of the mail not originally copied to x.ai.
Would like the ability to suggest the open meeting slots before scheduling meetings.
Would like the ability to provide a daily schedule before start of the day.
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.
I have used live virtual assistants and full-time PA's as well in the past. For a few bucks a month, X.ai takes away much of the drudge work involved in a PA keeping my calendar straight.
Reduces phone calls or emails by allowing client to pick a time that works for them and us, as we have already set our options and availability in settings and/or two-way calendar sync.
