Booker

Book It!

Vorteile:

Booker is a godsend for so many salons. It is very user-friendly and they have implemented the use of embedded training videos for all the features; this is a wonderful tool and works very well for people who are visual learners, which most stylists happen to be. For salon managers and owners, Booker offers a variety of tools: time-clock, sales tracking, inventory, tip allocation, expenditures/budgets, etc. Being a web-based software, it's very easy to add a widget or embed a link on your website and/or Facebook page to allow customers to easily schedule themselves for services. In addition, there is a built-in point of sale system that makes it easy to check out clients without needing to switch over to another program and/or system.

Nachteile:

The downside to being a web-based software: if the server is down or there is an issue with the website, you cannot access your calendar or your point of sale system. Booker has been awesome enough to provide a separate website where they allow you to report issues of the system being down and also announcing known issues. Their customer service makes up for this issue.

Easy appointment management, schedule settings could be improved

Kommentare: Overall easy set up and navigation. User friendly for clients, however could use some minor upgrades with scheduling customization.

Vorteile:

They notified you via email for every new appointment, making it easy to keep track of client appointments.

Nachteile:

Their practitioner scheduling could use some improvement, in terms of making it more customizable. There was no way to have practitioners on a bi-weekly schedule and had to be input manually week by week.

Excessive down time and Booker does not listen to customers

Kommentare: Lack of responsiveness to customer inquiries and valid concerns with downtime and non-functioning software. Most recently their denial of my subscription cancellation. They do not send a renewal notice or offer a reasonable cancellation window. These are very antiquated, predatory subscription practices.

Vorteile:

Booker originally seemed to have a robust suite of functionality including marketing.

Nachteile:

Booker has such excessive downtime that has cost my small business revenue (inability to book clients!) and poor client experience trying to book online. Because of this, I am switching to another platform and Booker will not let me cancel my subscription. Talk about antiquated, predatory subscription practices!

Ease of use

Vorteile:

I like it's ease of use and it's streamlined process in order to schedule.

Nachteile:

Sometimes the software can be a bit glitchy which can be frustrating and you have to start from square one.

Look elsewhere for scheduling & business software

Kommentare: disappointed

Vorteile:

can access schedule from mobile devices || clients can book appointments via web link

Nachteile:

unreliable , inconsistent, lack of ownership when software not working, lack of ownership when they add services to our list that we don't offer, no report is accurate

More disappointed than impressed

Kommentare: Poor experience. Sure, extra stuff was neat, but that's not what I got Booker for. We need a R E L I A B L E system. Not one that I have to always complain about. Oh, on that note, customer service wasn't helpful, but rather sarcastic and unprofessional. Extremely unhappy. The only time I actually had a decent experience was when I was cancelling. That was the most painless experience I had. The irony there.

Vorteile:

The email marketing functionality and the reporting was great.

Nachteile:

Beyond the email marketing functionality/analytical reporting, I am very disappointed. There is so much down-time with the software - unreliable. As a high volume, high end nail salon, we need to make sure that this cloud-based software is up 99% of the time, which was also their guarantee. During the busy summer months, the software would go down every other day. Absolutely unreliable. The user interface (UI) is so ugly compared to other modern softwares. There's a lag during the appointment bookings. Easy-of-use is a fail. Difficult to use as the software wasn't logically built. They probably need to rebuild from the ground up.

drives me to tears on the regular

Kommentare: It's hard to argue that it's not nice to have an all-in-one, web-based software that truly does do everything. The problem is that everything it does, it does poorly. It's impossible to teach to new staff, the bugs are frustrating, and the server downtime is unacceptable.

Vorteile:

Booker is truly all-in-one, it manages employee schedules, hours, bookings, online bookings, services, products, retail management, and point-of-sale.

Nachteile:

Booker is full of the most confusing bugs (which are never fixed eg. finding the next available appointment auto-fills the last viewed client, you can't add products to $0 services booked online), the servers go down regularly, the mobile app is terrible, the integration with our payment processor is shoddy, is extremely difficult to learn, has a lack of functionalities that are just bizarre (eg. impossible to mark doctor services as non-tippable, adding notes to client tickets, changing the names of service subcategories). Customer service is responsive, but unable to help in any concrete way. I use this software for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week and I despise it utterly.

Lots of features, that don't work.

Kommentare: The system does not work as it is supposed to, I have spent too much time calling support without anything getting resolved. The time an energy spent on using this system is not worth the price.

Vorteile:

I liked the appointment booking system. Easy to use and works without any problems.

Nachteile:

I have had booker for over 7 years. The system is really flawed and has a lot of bugs.

A good starting point for a scheduling platform

Kommentare: Fairly user friendly, easy to learn, and always loved all the details available.

Vorteile:

I mostly liked all of the details available for us - such as time stamps for appointment details, membership history, and so much more!

Nachteile:

There were frequent glitches in the system and eventually the platform simply did not have the infrastructure in place for our clientele size.

Decent platform for business management and booking appointments!

Kommentare: I found it an average platform for providing a decent appointment scheduling service to our customers.

Vorteile:

Convenient to use and make online appointments. Integration is easy and its mobile application is also very user-friendly. Its loyalty point feature is also very useful in attracting customers.

Nachteile:

Interface can be improved. Very frustrating to use due to its frequent down-time. Additional features of adding samples or images can be an added advantage.

So easy my 10 year old brother could use it

Vorteile:

The features make sense, and I've noticed as Booker is updating and adapting it just gets better.

Nachteile:

Although the updates are helping, it's just constant. Some of the updates don't really feel needed (like adding on upgrades during services. I liked the options just popping up. Now I have to do an extra step to add it.)

Not my first choice

Vorteile:

It was recommended to us by our franchise partner, nothing to like about it

Nachteile:

It crashes and freezes frequently, appointments just disappear

Booker needs a giant debug and reevaluation

Kommentare: Booker has been one of the most unreliable programs I have ever used and the support is never helpful. One day earlier this year it completely shut down for half the day and I couldn't book or check out clients. At least once a week it has a bug that effects some function of the software.

Vorteile:

The software is simple enough to use and the ability to see the entire calendar of the day is nice.

Nachteile:

It is full of bugs and constantly stops working. One day it shut down completely and we couldn't take payments or book appointments. The support line is very unhelpful.

New and Improved

Kommentare: Overall, it is a great booking website and it is a very easy system to learn. We recently added a brand login through this company as we are adding additional sites and it has been a very easy process.

Vorteile:

I love that they have created many updates for this software over the last few months. It has been really nice not experiencing any lag or issues with the booking features like we were having just a few months ago. I love that you can choose how far in advance the confirmation emails are sent out and I really love that the clients can confirm the appointment through the email. Another AMAZING tool is that you can now see when a client is booking an appointment online that way you are not trying to compete with anyone online trying to book. I hated in the past where I would be booking a client at the desk and right when I went to book, it said that I was not able to. Come to find out when I refreshed the page it was because someone else had booked it online. It truly makes a huge difference with these little improvements that they made.

Nachteile:

One thing at the moment that I am not liking about the software is that sometimes the confirmation emails do not send even when the emails box is checked, this also happens when I book re-occurring appointments for an entire year where these clients of all clients should receive all the emails. Another thing that gets frustrating from time to time is that the clients future appointments is not showing up on their account under the appropriate tab therefore some clients have not showed up for their appointment and we can't charge if they can prove they didn't see it online. I try to see if they have duplicate accounts as well but they do not. And lastly, every now and again Booker will give us booking issues while trying to book for any of our services, it will state that the appointment cannot book because no equipment is available however, I know that is not the case. That is frustrating because we have to then just create a block out on the schedule with the client's service along with their information but they don't receive any emails through the system when it is booked that way.

I used to love Booker, but fixes and updates come slowly and customer service is terrible!

Kommentare: Booker is a robust solution for online scheduling and taking payments too. In theory, Booker will save you loads of time since customers schedule and manage their own appointments. In reality, we spend too much time on the phone with Booker trying to work out quirks.

Vorteile:

Admin backend is solid and reliable. Lots of options to customize. Too many at times since finding just the right setting can take 15-20 minutes or require a phone call to customer service.

Nachteile:

Customer front end is weak and confusing. Booker does not allow certain booking options (CF2) to be used in iFrames. This forces you to send customers to a 3rd party website (not yours) to make appointments. Fixes and feature requests come slowly if at all. If you are interested in using Booker be sure you know what you are getting into before you commit. It is very difficult to get 100, 500, or thousands of customers to move to a new appointment system if you later decide Booker is not what you expected. Get used to what Booker looks like now and be okay with that for the long haul. Don't plan on being able to add a feature of even getting Booker to fix bugs. Booker will show you a long list of "fixes" and revision numbers of updated software. I have never known any of these updates to address a bug of concern we had with the SaaS. Customer requests are ignored and bugs are described as features. Yes, they really are! For example, in some places staff names are sorted by first name and in other places they are sorted by last name. This does make it feel like you are using different software products and will infuriate you at times. Different interfaces all work differently. In other words, they all feel like different products. We use the admin interface, the Booker iOS app, the Booker customer app, CF1, and Facebook app. That seems like lots of great options until you realize how disjointed and different they all are. You are not merely learning one software package, you really have to learn them all.

Horrendous. Terrible Experience. Bad Platform. Bad Support.

Kommentare: zero. only pain and anguish and wasted money. I can't even get the reps to respond to my emails about a refund. I would strongly recommend against using Booker.

Vorteile:

I liked the notion of what they "sell" to you. not what they actually deliver. I guess I like that it's a cloud based system, which you can't say for Millennium.

Nachteile:

Booker is going more towards a multi-industry platform & removed many of its spa related functionality. No longer can you create spa packages, for example. Much of the customization they sell you on doesn't exist at all. It used to on their old platform, but new customers don't get to use that anymore, so your gift card site & the online booking site will look like a Kindergartner designed it in an extracurricular activity. You don't have the ability to customize categories for your services/products. For example, if you do hydrotherapy, there isn't a category for things like vichy showers. You do have auto repair available though... so congrats. If you're looking to have a smooth experience with onboarding, you'll be disappointed. The data "expert" we worked with missed his deadline by 4 weeks and then just disappeared. We had to start completely over and then the new "expert" imported the wrong data and we had to start over again. We worked with onboarding for almost 5 months and never got live. There's no ecommerce capabilities, even though their web site promotes it and their sales people promote it. At this point, it's a flat out lie. Doesn't exist. You have to work with a 3rd party for your POS system (Clover). We signed up for a special and were supposed to get 2 set ups for free, but they came back to us after we signed up and said "nope, sorry, we were wrong, you can only have one." And, then they sent us 2, except one was incompatible with Booker.

Keeping everyone on the same page

Kommentare: The survey section is really helpful to hear from clients on what we can add or change to make their experience the best it can be. The flexibility of having booker app on our phone lets us have everything we need at all times.

Vorteile:

Booker is so great. Everyone of my staff has their own logins to look at their schedules at any time. My accounting department (that is in a different building) has access to check balances....my HR department can also access it to do payroll....making it easy for us all to stay on the same page of the business. At any time my GM can look at the dash board to see where we stand any any given time of the month. The clients love it because they can make appointments on line and they love the text reminders for their appointments. As the director I want to make sure clients are happy...I get feed back from surveys that let us know if we are doing things right or if we need to improve on things. Bookers Customer service used to be a little frustrating but I feel like they have really stepped it up lately. Thanks Booker for helping us do our job in a very efficient way!

Nachteile:

I wish we could add specials or notes to certain days...their really isn’t any place for that. We end up putting notes in someone’s schedule so it shows up on the day...it works but not ideal.

Poor Customer Service

Vorteile:

It did give you a tracking method for services & products sold. It generated a monthly sales tax report

Nachteile:

Booker charged us a "marketing" fee for months on end. Apparently the marketing product was not what we were sold - that is the ability to generate marketing campaigns to a specific demographics. Instead, it was an "automatic discount" offered to patients that motivated them to wait for follow up services so that they got them for a deeply discounted fee. Booker took credit for selling these services due to their discount program. In the end all they did was to sell price not quality. Quality should be what spa services are all about! If price is the final objection then it should be in the hands of the provider to decide what discount is appropriate. In order to sell more than one unit of Botox, we had to pick from an assortment of quantities of Botox to equal todays purchase. The software is not user friendly and the predefined reports are weak at best. It was not a management tool! Worse it did a horrible job of taking the place of our former hosted spa services software. When it came time to leave, they stole our data, gave us a few excel files and redacted them after a few months. I would neither recommend the product nor would I EVER purchase from this vendor again.

Too many maintenance days per month

Kommentare: I would give it a 5/10 or less for the reasons above, but also it is constantly shutting down for maintenance. The amount of times I would go and book in a Patient, to have the site shut down, made it very difficult to reply only on booker.

Vorteile:

I like that Booker has a very clean look, and it is quite easy to block time and schedule in Patients/clients. You can leave check-in or check-out alerts for an individual. I also like that when you go to book an appointment, if the client has been in previously, their name will pop up.

Nachteile:

If I did wish to book multiple recurrent appointments with a Patient, I couldn't do that with a click of a button, I would have to go to each date and book it separately. If an employee has two rooms they are using for the day, you have to have it on seperate columns... i.e. bill 1 and bill 2, which can get complicated for reporting. There is no charting option with the software.

Terrible customer service

Kommentare: I purchased this product under the guidance of one representative who basically went MIA the moment my card was charged. He set up a training appt at the wrong time from a previously agreed upon time. He also told me my "sign up fee" was a "set up fee" which made me think I was going to at least be assisted in setting up my acct. I tried several times (email and calls to his direct line) to reach him the moment I received the confirmation email for my training time, never received a response back. At that point I attempted the main number but couldn't get through for days. Your wait time is 2 minutes is what I heard for several calls totaling in over 30 min +. I finally reached someone (6 days after initial purchase) and I had decided to cancel my acct. due to my experience with poor customer service. I was told then that my investment, in what I thought was a set up fee, cannot be refunded as sign up fees are nonrefundable. On top of it all they charged my acct a prorated amount for 8 days of service (assuming 8 bc they were slow in canceling). So now after not receiving any training or set up assistance with many hours sitting on hold they are still keeping my money.
I do not recommend this product to anyone at all! Stay away!

Nachteile:

I purchased this product under the guidance of one representative who basically went MIA the moment my card was charged. He set up a training appt at the wrong time from a previously agreed upon time. He also told me my "sign up fee" was a "set up fee" which made me think I was going to at least be assisted in setting up my acct. I tried several times (email and calls to his direct line) to reach him the moment I received the confirmation email for my training time, never received a response back. At that point I attempted the main number but couldn't get through for days. Your wait time is 2 minutes is what I heard for several calls totaling in over 30 min +. I finally reached someone (6 days after initial purchase) and I had decided to cancel my acct. due to my experience with poor customer service. I was told then that my investment, in what I thought was a set up fee, cannot be refunded as sign up fees are nonrefundable. On top of it all they charged my acct a prorated amount for 8 days of service (assuming 8 bc they were slow in canceling). So now after not receiving any training or set up assistance with many hours sitting on hold they are still keeping my money. I do not recommend this product to anyone at all! Stay away!

Used to be good, now stinks

Kommentare: It works, but I need decent customer service.

Vorteile:

Booker works fairly well most of the time, but there are occasional glitches and every once in a while the system will crash, but that seems to have gotten better in time. User friendly and fairly intuitive

Nachteile:

Booker's customer service has gone to waste. It used to be good. You could get someone on the phone who knew what they were doing and they'd solve your problems. A while back they started using a call center in god knows what country and they STINK! It's become impossible to get a hold of anyone who can solve problems. They don't respond to emails, or if they do, it's just an automated response that doesn't really address the issue.

A Very Useful Tool for Every Business

Kommentare: I use Booker as our point of sale system in a number of locations since everything is in one place, simplifying our work. I've tried seven other point-of-sale programs, including Salon Iris, Square, Micros, and others, but none of them compare to Booker as a POS program for salons.

Vorteile:

Staff scheduling and operating hours are simple to do and follow to.There are so many options for categories to pick from, and I appreciate that you can create your own, so it's easy to add and remove services from our menu.

Nachteile:

Too many errors and issues with making appointments. Sometimes it will state there is no personnel on duty or the service won't appear on the menu. Refreshing the page and logging out and back in again won't always work.

Gregory O - Superb Customer Service Experience

Kommentare: I want to sincerely thank Booker for the excellent service provided by Gregory O, during several recent requests we made; He has gone above and beyond, even supplying me with a level of data and assistance I was previously told would not be possible to get. He did it in an extremely expeditious and efficient manner and again affirms our confidence that Booker is the leading platform in our industry. Thanks again for providing such a great business tool and we look forward to using booker for many years to come.

Vorteile:

The "all in one nature" of the platform but also the ability to have an online store that links to our actual inventory and pricing levels in real time. The confirmation email for appointments are a great asset to in terms of revenue loss prevention and saves time for our staff, not to mention our clients love the convenience. The pre-authorization of credit cards is a great function again for loss prevention.

Nachteile:

1, There have been times recently were the downtime or stability (slowness) of the platform has not been acceptable. 2, The ip lock function only works with v4 ip addresses (most ISP's are now using v6's rendering the function useless unless you pay extra for static IP's.

So far - so good!

Kommentare: I've worked with the Booker system for 8 months now, and I've definitely enjoyed my experiences with it. We receive near live updates whenever there is an issue with the system - instead of being left to guess, as with other Spa software systems. I've found it to be clean, well designed, aesthetically pleasing, simple to understand, and full of hidden abilities that I have found to be extremely helpful in the management of our organization. Although there are a few capabilities I wish it could offer, Booker is genius at what it does already.

Vorteile:

- Ease of use - Mobile application - Partnership with Frederick - Easy to book online - Aesthetically pleasing - Easy access to customer service (with real people!)

Nachteile:

There are certain limitations to the software that I don't quite endorse, and would love to have more accessibility to customize the features inherent in the system. For instance, we would love to be able to format, on our own, the infrastructure of the Administrator, Reservationist, and Staff roles to allow for certain levels of access to information. Although we have found a way to "Macguyver" the system, we'd love for there to be a more direct system for integrating digital SOAP notes, as well as intake form and profile management by the client when they log in to book an appointment. There have been other, very slight issues, which have caused some annoyance to our clients - such as the automatic CC authorization process when opening orders, or when clients are unable to cancel upcoming appointments online at their convenience (so long as it does not violate our 24-hour policy).

Frustrating and inconsistent

Kommentare: The ability to serve multiple locations and the ability to book appointments and sell retail simultaneously.

Vorteile:

I like the fact that Booker can be used for multiple locations and is helpful with daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly statistics. I can use the data to determine what I need to do differently regarding sales, promotions, etc. I can also use the data to determine what services, promotions, etc. are going well and should definitely be continued.

Nachteile:

The customer support is lacking. It has been so frustrating to speak to so many different reps. The notes they take and calls they log has been very inconsistent, making follow-through to a resolution impossible. Even when issues have been pushed through to technical support or the development team, we have gotten little to no helpful feedback. I feel the software could use some updating to improve on the ease of use. Mostly, I feel customer support reps should be trained to actually offer "support," rather than offer a "pat" answer and such as, "This is not a Booker issue," or "I can't really tell you why that is happening, call us again if the problem reoccurs." Overall, our experience has been frustrating. In all fairness, our particular "case," which includes many different issues has been escalated to someone in management, but this has taken several months.