When you manage reservations and bookings, your service personnel spends a large amount of time fielding phone calls from people who want to schedule, presenting choices to clients, and updating calendars. This can be avoided by employing an online booking system with a comprehensive scheduling app to streamline your operations.
In this article, we'll explain why the demand for a booking system online has skyrocketed and what best scheduling app you should consider for your business.
What Is an Online Booking System?
As the name suggests, a scheduling app or online booking system accepts orders, reservations, and booking services online. It is now more than that, though. A scheduling app is a software solution that allows prospects to self-book and settle all their payments/purchases through your website and other channels. Meanwhile, it offers you the best capabilities to manage and grow your business in just one platform.
What Is the Benefit of an Online Booking System?
One of the most significant benefits of an online booking system is that you can keep your business open for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This way, you can accommodate more customers. Also, you and your staff need not be tethered to your workstation. You can go home in time for supper, enjoy weekends with your families and friends, go on local activities even on a Monday, and still be able to attend to your customers.
Most significantly, now that appointment schedules are available online, you can quickly organize and manage your workplace. In return, create the best guest experience possible to maintain and earn new consumers.
What Is the Best Booking Platform?
Whether you have an effective system in place to book and reserve clients or not, technology is keeping up to ensure that your company operations run smoothly. Therefore, you may do business comfortably and without much effort.
With that, we've compiled a list of the top 5 best booking apps for managing your calendar, scheduling guests, managing cancellations/refunds, and more.
#1 SimplyBook.me
SimplyBook.me is an online booking system that aims to connect individuals and service businesses by allowing them to effortlessly reserve their services online regardless of which, where, or when they wish to book. This scheduling app simply identifies your services and suppliers, displays availability, and you will have both old and new clients placing reservations 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
SimplyBook.me allows you to gather all the business and service information your clients require while eliminating the need for email trails, missed calls, and phone tags. Your clients may fill your appointment book online, eliminating the need for you to answer the phone, react to emails, or sacrifice your own time to accommodate late callers.
Key Features
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Accept Online Bookings 24/7: Maintain your booking channels 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and allow your clients to make appointments through different channels such as your booking website, company website, Facebook, Instagram, or Google Business Profile.
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Personalized Notifications: Send personalized email or sms reminders before planned visits. You can collect a deposit up ahead to eliminate last-minute cancellations. Then, you can avoid duplicated bookings by synchronizing your calendar with your online booking schedule.
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Facebook, Instagram & Google: Accept appointments with a "Book Now" button on your Facebook page and Instagram profile. This allows clients to quickly locate your business on Google so that they can schedule your services right away.
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Manage Employees Anytime and Anywhere: Schedule your personnel, services, and opening hours across various locations efficiently, or provide virtual meetings with Teams, Google Meet, or other video conferencing apps.
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Client Information Upon Booking: Make personalized intake forms to collect customer information throughout the booking process. You may ask for text and digits, checkboxes, drop-down or date replies, and files or photos from clients.
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Accept Online Payments: Easily accept online payments and deposits with various payment processors like PayPal, Stripe, and others, or accept cash or card payments onsite via their POS system. Provide your customers with a simple in-store payment experience. SimplyBook.me's new payment function, SBPay, allows you to process payments with your client's saved credit card.
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Integration & API: Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business native integration, WordPress, and other CMS systems are available, or you can utilize the API of this online booking software to create your custom integrations.
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Client & Admin App: Provide clients with their own personalized client schedule app to book your services, and encourage your staff to download the admin app to manage your business on the move.
Besides that, the customisable features of this online booking system set it apart from other scheduling apps on this list. For instance, sending "Book soon" notices when your existing customers are ready for a refresher may convert them into recurring clients. During the booking process, sell service add-ons or items and offer money-saving bundles.
With the Loyalty System, Coupons, and Gift Certificates, you can keep your loyal customers returning by making them feel appreciated. Inform all of your clients that they can make appointments with you online 24 hours a day, seven days a week and that they can earn points for each service purchased. Send personalized emails to your clients with our drag-and-drop email designer, and create marketing campaigns for your client list.
Furthermore, you may create your booking website, too. With over 20 distinct themes and layouts to select from, choose your preferred theme and design for your booking website. Personalize the design to reflect your company. Use your color schemes and features. Upload photographs and create personalized pages. Gather feedback from your customers after your customer appointments. Then post it on your booking website to establish a good reputation for your services.
Pros
SimplyBook.me differs from other online booking systems with built-in special features. You can choose whatever unique features you want to add to your appointment booking system. Custom features might include accepting payments, having a waiting list, selling items, selling bundles and gift cards, offering coupons, etc.
Another thing that sets them apart from the competition is that SimplyBook.me provides a wide variety of booking website templates you can choose from. You can edit each to match your brand colors and include photos of your logo, service providers, and corporate locations.
In detail, you can find some of their major advantages here:
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Accept online bookings all the time
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Accept booking from your social media channels
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Reduce no shows & double bookings
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Access client information upon booking in
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Customizable features for wherever industry you are
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Lets you summon your staff online for meetings and reminders
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Seamless payment system for your clients
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Integrations to bring your workplace to one location
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Offers a dedicated booking website, if you don't have one already
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Provides a booking widget to place on your existing website
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Their freemium version is a good online booking system for small business
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Configure features to market your services better, attract more customers, and make loyal ones
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A personalized scheduling app for your clients and an admin app for you
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24/7 live chat support
Cons
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No client app for the freemium version
SimplyBook.me allows you to construct a robust online booking system quickly. You may now take online bookings from clients, either through your website or through a booking website created from one of their services, as well as through your social media accounts.
Sign up now and get started in just a few minutes.
#2 Acuity Scheduling App
Acuity Scheduling is the appointment scheduling software to use if you're a startup or not an expert in the technical aspects of online software. From this, you can allow your clients to pick recurring bookings, fill out an intake form, and pay upfront for services when you construct your booking site. You can also provide coupons and allow consumers to add more services upon booking.
During setup, you'll select monthly or daily views for clients, construct intake forms, upload a logo, define a time zone, and determine whether clients need to choose their own standard time to minimize distant call complications.
You may allow customers to postpone or reschedule their appointments. Or, adjust the interval for scheduled start times, which is by default set every 15 minutes. You can control how long beforehand, or on short notice, consumers can make an appointment. When you've finalized features for your online scheduler, share your booking page through a direct link or embed it into your website.
Key Features and Benefits
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Online booking system for small businesses and beginners
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Lets your clients add more services and pay in an instant
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Client-centric configurations
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Available in mobile apps to accommodate your clients easily
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Can cater to different appointment types
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Powerful integration options
#3 Zoho Bookings
While most online appointment scheduling apps are comprehensive, intuitive, and feature-rich, the most commendable feature is how Zoho Bookings interacts seamlessly with other Zoho products like Meeting, Calendar, CRM, Assist, Flow, and Sites.
Through established reserve times and scheduled breaks, days off or special hours, and a bespoke cancellation policy, Zoho Bookings provides a lot of flexibility. You can even create many workstations with their booking pages and calendars. The calendar dashboard is simple to use and navigate. It has several views and gives you the ability to examine the cumulative schedule for all workspaces or even just one.
You can share one URL that will work for the entire company or create direct URLs for each booking type. Alternatively, each of your staff can have their booking page URL to share with consumers. One unusual and valuable feature is that the program can automatically allocate appointments to the least-busy employee at the moment.
Key Features and Benefits
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Intuitive and easy to use interface
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Integrates well with other Zoho offerings to complete your workflows on one page
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Easily tweak what your clients will see upon booking
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Manages your time well and protects your earnings with cancellation policies
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Comprehensive calendars for both staff and clients
#4 TimeTap
TimeTap is one of the most scalable and adaptable appointment scheduling platforms available. It provides an excellent balance of flexibility, automation, and functionality. TimeTap customers also have a lot of granular flexibility over the app's settings when presenting their online booking system to their clients.
You can use it to create a website where you can edit the web address, add a logo and SEO fields, customize message boxes, and select a color scheme and style to match your company's brand. TimeTap also offers a fully customizable calendar view, with options such as a weekly calendar, availability display, appointment schedules, and class lists.
Furthermore, you can make recurring appointments, define locations, create elaborate booking forms, and easily tweak the scheduling rules and logic according to your goals. With that, larger firms will surely benefit from TimeTap's infinite appointments and clients and several employee calendars with varying degrees of protection. The booking function also includes a helpful waitlist, so you can reduce the possibility of no-shows losing you money even if you're fully booked.
Key Features and Benefits
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Lets you control the settings to personalize your booking system
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Has a comprehensive calendar to manage your appointments
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Protects your privacy and money with policies
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Helpful waitlist for your loyal customers
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Add more feature-rich functionalities through integrations
#5 Picktime
You may want to consider Picktime if you're searching for booking software that will get you client-ready at all times. The online scheduling app provides a free plan that includes unlimited bookings, three team members, two locations, and other essential native integrations. This makes it ideal for small enterprises that need to manage bookings and orders.
To access your entire schedule of scheduled appointments, categories, and resources, click the sidebar menu and select Calendar. To personalize your booking page, calendar rules, and booking inquiries, go to Online Booking. That's all there is to it. But here's the bottom line: it's not the most configurable of the five.
Regardless, you can access other features that are beneficial to both ends. Pre-built widgets for Facebook, Google Maps, and various website builders allow clients to book from almost anywhere.
The overview dashboard is the most impressive feature. You can view all the crucial facts at a glance, such as total appointments, confirmed, predicted, and total income, as well as what's coming up next.
Key Features and Benefits
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Easy to use and free online booking system
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Syncs to your calendar
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Widgets to let you post bookings and let your clients book
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Overview dashboard to see your performance
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Invoicing, payments, sales, and reporting
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Manages your clients and your team
Whether offering products or services, an online booking system will sort out everything for you. You can accommodate a large number of clients in just a few clicks and easily manage all appointments online. With this functionality, you can surely earn back your investment and attract more clients in the future.
For this, we highly recommend SimplyBook.me for its customizable features depending on your industry and other programs that will make it easy to run your business. This is followed by the rest of our best appointment scheduling apps.
