Empowering Small Businesses on the Web

Book­fresh (www.bookfresh.com) is a great online sys­tem for allow­ing clients, or poten­tial clients, to book time with you, with­out your hav­ing to undergo a tir­ing back-and-forth, or oth­er­wise waste each other’s time sched­ul­ing an appoint­ment. It is a beau­ti­fully designed, intel­li­gent system.

How­ever, I have had some real issues with it, and after many months, I finally decided to put them down in an email to them, which I repeat here:

—

Hello. I would like to pro­vide some feed­back that I hope will be helpful.

I repeat­edly find that I wish I could make use of your ser­vice — although, at this point, I would only like to use it 2 or 3 times a month, at this point. I believe I will grow, and could want it more in the future.

So, obvi­ously I have a free account. How­ever, like many peo­ple I use Google Cal­en­dar to man­age my appointments.

My main feed­back is this:

Because the free account does not allow me to sync with Google Cal­en­dar, I can­not use your ser­vice in any way that would really sim­u­late the expe­ri­ence of actu­ally sav­ing me any time.

If the free account synced with Google Cal­en­dar — even if I were only allowed a few appoint­ments a month — I could have the expe­ri­ence of send­ing some­one the link, and JUST FORGETTING ABOUT IT, which would make me so happy, and know­ing they would pick what­ever (damn) time they wanted to to make the appoint­ment, and it would all work out perfectly.

So what I am say­ing is that your free sam­ple ver­sion of your prod­uct does not give any­one the actual expe­ri­ence of what it would be like to pay for the prod­uct. You want to make your free sam­ple be an ENTICING TASTE of the actual, paid product.

Not allow­ing the Google Cal­en­dar sync­ing seems like a form of being “too cheap,” to use a phrase. Shoot­ing your­self in the foot is another, sorry if I am being blunt.

Now, if I were using the ser­vice 2 or 3 times a month, even your full, actual ser­vice, you wouldn’t really want me to pay 20 bucks for it, would you? Per­haps you would just give it to me for free, know­ing I would rave about it — as it would save me so much time, and make my life bet­ter — and hope I would later grow until I wanted to use it more.

Or, you might charge me 5 bucks, or some­thing like that. Or, a dol­lar per appoint­ment. I’d be happy to pay that, which is actu­ally quite substantial.

But — and I am sure I have OVER-hammered my point here, at this point–is that, cur­rently, with my free ser­vice, I will never have an expe­ri­ence of how won­der­ful your ser­vice could be.

Sec­ondly, I think you are miss­ing out on an entire cat­e­gory of users who don’t have mas­sive appoint­ment set­ting busi­nesses like hair styl­ists or some­thing, but nev­er­the­less would LOVE to stop hav­ing to waste their time play­ing phone or email tag with clients, just to set up a bloody appoint­ment. I.e., they are not $20 cus­tomers, but they could still be cus­tomers. For peo­ple like me, the leap between free and $20 is sim­ply far too high.

Thanks!

I don’t expect you will call me about this, but you’re very wel­come to. I am a web devel­oper and con­sul­tant in Santa Cruz, CA. My phone num­ber is (831) 435‑9053. I would be happy to give you more feed­back, if you like.

I hope this has been help­ful. I do con­sider that, out of the dozens of sys­tems I have looked at, yours is the CLOSEST to the one I would ACTUALLY want to use, and that is why, after dozens of times of com­ing back to the site, and hav­ing this feed­back, I have finally decided to actu­ally write this.

Sin­cerely,

Chris Bur­bridge