SimplyBook.me

Pluspunten

It has some really great features that we needed - multiple locations, the ability to take appointment deposits, customise notification emails and having a questionnaire for clients to fill in at the point of booking. The ability to download our daily appointments as a CSV file is really useful - generally speaking, the amount of data we're able to extract from it for our monitoring is fantastic. The customer service is fast and helpful.

Minpunten

The interface took a bit of getting used to (but once you're used to it, it's fine! We have some single appointments for one person and some workshops with multiple spaces, but they have to be set up in the same way so the workshop booking interface is quite clunky from the customer's perspective. Some of the info (for example the service description) isn't viewable on mobile devices which is a shame. The recent price rises were a bit of a shock when it came to renew our subscription and unfortunately it has now become unaffordable for us to keep using.

Pluspunten

Incredible amount of features for the $.
HIPAA compliance / encryption
SOAP notes
Versatility
Complete customization of confirmation emails to both service providers & Services
Very easy for clients to navigate
Clients can track their own packages
Ability to force pre-pay
Intake form option

Seriously, I could list a ton more amazing features plus the fact that they continue to add more.

Minpunten

Realizing this was initially designed to serve salons, not health care providers, I hope to see improvements in the following areas:

SOAP notes are the only therapy note option. Woud be nice to have a simple progress notes option.

Ability to tender in person payments directly thru the platform would be a really big deal for us. Right now, a transaction is only tendered if they pay when they book thru the website. In person, we can create invoices and mark them as paid, but need to use a separate platform to capture cc payment.

It would be nice if we didn't have to go thru a 3rd party for video calls. Gruveo has been good so far, but it's still extra steps to move from appt to video. Ideally, the ability for the practitioner to enter the video call directly thru their appointment calendar would be grt.

A mobile app for clients to manage appts & take video calls would be excellent.

I think these r the biggest things that affect us, but even with these, the simplybook platform has been grt.

Pluspunten

SimplyBook.me is the ONLY "booking engine" which had the capability to integrate "same day book & play" online booking with our in-house "walk-in's" ticketing system. Not only does it "work", but it's a "near perfect fit!" (Largely due to the custom feature "add-ins.") I had done extensive research & tried them all.... Simplybook.me is in a class of it's own. Surprisingly, customer support is also truly "world-class!" Having a fair amount of coding & web design experience, I dug in a lot deeper than the average user. In doing so I uncovered several bugs. Not only was the support phenomenal, but most of the fixes came FAST!

Booking is fast, easy & designed to work well with smart phones. (Really well for the most part with proper setup, selecting the right "timeline" & adding the CSS custom feature add-in.)

Minpunten

"Power comes at a price": Monthly fees are based on "custom feature add-ins." IMO, their tiered pricing needs more flexibility. Pricing model is also based on # of bookings & # of SMS messages (if you use them.) This is not a big deal and actually favors "low volume users." (There is even a 100% free plan that comes with 1 custom feature of your choice.) BUT: If you need more than 3 custom features, monthly fees triple to get to the next tier which is 8 features. (So for a business that only does a few bookings a month but need more than 3 features, SimplyBook.me may be too expensive to use.) ~ However: If you do enough volume", your bringing in enough sales to "more than justify" using the best booking system on the planet!

"Custom CSS" custom feature: Had to use the "Weekly Classes" timeline ALONG with this custom feature ("CSS custom feature) to avoid/minimize potential user mistakes in booking. The combination of these two work OK. With a few "simple" modifications to the other timelines, those should work well too. Hopefully the engineers will make two (2) very slight "navigational" & "display" modifications to correct these issues when using the other timelines.

"Group Bookings" custom feature: When using "group billing custom feature" (one booking for a group of participants): A default quantity of 1 always displays. (Making it too easy for user to forget to select the correct quantity. And on the review screen, this quantity does not appear.)

Pluspunten

Easy to use, almost trouble free (works almost every time). Interface is appealing, and customers can access site very easily.

Minpunten

1. My customers frequently complain that they cannot book an appointment. This is because it is not very clear that a time slot has already been booked and they need to try and search for another one that is not.

I think to overcome this, a pop-up message should appear at the booking site every time someone tries to book a time slot that is taken already. The message could read "This session is already booked or there is insufficient time available to book this time slot. Please try another time slot". The little red sentence that currently appears on your system is rarely seen by my customers nor is the dimmed grey lettering of the time slots evident enough for customers to realize the slot is taken already.

In addition, you can provide a week or month-at-a-glance view of the time days/time slots already booked and those available so customers can easily see which ones to select.

2. It would be great if I could add a link from my Simplebookme webpage so customers can click on to view more information about a service or product than what is allowed from your site.

Pluspunten

you can easily modify schedules and specific days and make modifications to services. If you're running a one day promo it is so easy to set up and customize to a specific technician and day.
Having reminders for both the service provider and clients is a great feature and setting the time of the reminder also helps as it eliminates those last minute cancellations.
Sending an automated link to clients after their service to complete a review is one of the better features ! It eliminates having to remember to follow up when your schedule is busy and it completes the service. These reviews can also be used to further promote your business. Seeing the calendar in different views whether by tech per week day or month allows you to see company performance easily and also compare to other months and previous year I am one of the Franchises and we have over 40 now locates across Canada and now overseas. Many of our other Franchises were looking for a simple online booking system and I've told them about your site. It would be nice to see all of Tan on the Run use this site to streamline our bookings.

Minpunten

there is not much negative to say about the software. initially when you set up you get to try all features but when it's new and you're not getting a lot of traffic at first it's hard to try them all so i would only suggest that maybe after 6 months when a client sets up and has really understood and had time to really try out the software to offer this later as well. I understand as a business it might not be possible but I think I would have been more inclined to get a couple extra features to see what works.
I did try the promotion feature and found it really difficult to manoeuvre and after several failed attempts and trials gave up. It was very limiting for the discount unless you've changed this. I liked that you could select specific clients to send to but other than that it didn't work for me.
Also trying to add a service from mobile doesn't work. I couldn't get the whole screen to hit `save.