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January 28, 2013

BookFresh – Accept Appointments Online

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BookFresh is a tool that small business owners can use to make appointment bookings online. By allowing new and existing clients to schedule their own appointments from the comfort of their home computers, service professionals can spend less time answering telephone calls and more time marketing their businesses to a wider audience.

Embed BookFresh into your existing website, and you can start accepting online bookings right away. Input the hours when you’re available to work — making sure to take out time for lunch breaks, special events, and other days when your business will be closed — along with the schedules of any employees you’ll be accepting bookings for through the platform. Clients who schedule their appointments through BookFresh can pay in advance with PayPal and receive automated email reminders before their scheduled appointments. At the same time, you’ll receive text messages from BookFresh letting you know whenever new appointments have been booked. You can accept or reject these bookings based on your own schedule or personal preference.

In addition to its client booking platform, BookFresh also provides SMBs with customer review tools that they can use to collect positive testimonials from satisfied clients. Clients can then share these testimonials with their friends on social networking sites like Facebook, which helps drive referrals and increase word-of-mouth marketing for SMBs.

Practical Uses:

  • Let clients schedule appointments online
  • Cut down on the number of calls coming into your company each day
  • Accept deposits from clients when reserving their appointments
  • Send reminders to customers before their scheduled appointments

Insider Tips:

  • Add BookFresh widget to your existing website
  • BookFresh integrates with Google Calendar and Apple iCal
  • Businesses can accept payments through PayPal
  • Each staff member gets his or her own profile and scheduling calendar

What we liked:

  • BookFresh sends automated reminders to clients before their appointments
  • SMBs can require that clients pay for services before confirming their appointments
  • Businesses can send automated review requests to clients six months after their appointments
  • Users can choose to accept or deny any bookings made through their websites

What we didn’t like:

  • BookFresh is aimed at small businesses, which means larger companies may not find the features suitable for their needs

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched: 2007
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: San Francisco, California
  • Founded by: Ryan Donahue
  • Web site: http://www.bookfresh.com

Costs:

  • Freebie account
  • Business account is $19.95/month
  • Enterprise account with custom pricing

Comments

  1. Its like you read my mind! You seem to know a lot about this, like you wrote the book in
    it or something. I think that you could do with some pics to drive
    the message home a bit, but instead of that, this is magnificent blog.
    An excellent read. I’ll certainly be back.

  2. Also check out Acuity Scheduling (https://acuityscheduling.com), around since 2006 it’s an affordable alternatives with a *ton* of features and awesome support.

  3. Here is a new generation of appointment and queuing scheduling systems…. http://quesmart.com offers the ability to set your appointment via a virtual queue without the need to call or go online….you can simply do it via an SMS …. moreover it gives you a forecast of wait times as well….pretty cool….

  4. Ellioitt Friedeman

    I recently gave up my Bookfresh account and switched to Acuity. I would stronly recommend avoiding Bookfresh for many reasons. Acuity has all the same options with a lower price and a dramatically better interface. Most of the Bookfresh inadequacies center around a surprisingly deficient calendar and appointment entry system. To navigate from January, 2013 to January 2013, you have to click an arrow 12 times to move to the latter calendar. Entering an appointment was needlessly complicated. I would click on the 3:00 to 3:30 appointment slot and a screen would pop up saying “starting time, 3:35 PM and ending time 3:15 PM”. To correct those inaccurate prepopulated time, I would have to first go in the starting time box, get my cursor to enter the proper numbers, which usually would not allow the curson to click to the right of the digit need to be changes so arrow key were needed to get to the right space to delete the wrong time entry. Similarly if you want to delete a client the procedure is rediculously complicated. I had to scroll to the bottom of the screen with the client’ s name, click delete, scroll to the top of the screen to click on “yes, I want to delete this entry, and then back to the bottom of the page to press another delete button. In summary the software in this program must have been constructed by a 6th grader who got a D- on the project. To top it off response to questions was painfully slow, often days, and promises made to make improvements were never adhered to. I ran a close second to the incompetency of this program by purchasing it in the first place and second failing to switch to another program 8 or 9 months.

  5. joe

    I checked out

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