Genbook Scheduling App

Genbook

by Genbook

More Appointments. Less Hassles.
Suited for: Freelancers, Smbs
Helps with: Calendar,Scheduling
Languages: English
Similar to: Doodle App Acuity Scheduling App Humanity App Bookeo App More...

What is it all about?

Genbook is powerful and easy-to-use scheduling software that gives you total control over your online availability and the flexibility to manage your entire business.

Genbook offers everything you need at a small business price.

Unlimited appointments, staff and schedules means Genbook grows at the speed of your business.

Typically used for:

Video

Video & screenshots

screenshots

Genbook App Screen 0 Genbook App Screen 1 Genbook App Screen 2

Who is it for?

Freelancers
Startups
Agencies
SMBs
Enterprises

Key Features

Online Appointment Scheduling Offer your clients convenient online appointment booking to maximize your schedule. Instant Confirmation & Calendar Sync Staff and clients get automatic confirmations on mobile, computer or tablet. Appointments sync with your favorite calendars, so you're always up to date. Verified Customer Reviews With Genbook, your clients can write reviews of their visit. You choose the best comments and easily promote them across the web to attract even more customers. Social Network Visibility Genbook includes social media marketing tools to promote your business across your social networks. Powerful Customer Analytics Review your customer information, appointment history and business performance charts so you have the information you need to grow your business. Offer Special Promotions Easily create and promote special offers and discounts online to attract more business. Clients can buy and book online while you control when and how many you sell. Market Your Business Improve your web visibility on places like Google and Facebook to make it easier for new customers to find you. Genbook Grows With You Add staff members to Genbook as you grow. Each staff gets their own login to keep track of their schedules while you always have the full picture. Genbook Mobile Stay connected and manage your appointments while on-the-go with your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. Amazing Support Genbook is here to help with useful tips, tutorials and online customer support. Safe, Secure & Fully Backed-up Your important business information is safe, secure and fully backed-up to give you peace of mind. 30 Day Free Trial Get started growing your business today with a 30 day free trial of Genbook. No credit card required.

Benefits

Genbook will grow your business while saving you time and money. * Advanced Features Customizable for Your Small Business Turn web traffic into confirmed appointments. * Manage Your Staff and Maximize Your Schedule Move your appointment book online and get a clear view in real-time of your Business performance and Staff utilization. * Promote your Reputation Collect and publish Verified Customer Reviews to attract new customers. * Keep Your Business Competitive by Staying in Touch Contact Management, Customer Database, and Social Media features help you connect with and track your customers. Invite your customers to schedule appointments online when and where it’s convenient for them. * Everyone in Synch Synchronize your calendars and eliminate no-shows with automated email and text message notifications and reminders.


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Pricing

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Lifetime
Free
Freemium
Trial With Card
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By Quote

Description

Free Trial: Available (No Credit Card Required)
Starting At $20\Month Per User
Simple pricing that grows with you.

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Genbook

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Genbook – Scheduling and More for Your Small Business

Genbook – Scheduling and More for Your Small Business

By Bill Mann | 1/11/2016 | Product Analysis

Genbook is a web-based scheduling program for small to medium local businesses. Typical customers include spas, fitness instructors, hair and nail salons, wellness and medical providers, finance and legal professionals, and many other local services. It takes only a few minutes to get your business online, and you can start accepting appointments immediately.

Genbook isn’t a program you install on your computer. Rather, it uses the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach. That means that you connect to Genbook through the Internet. You can use their service without having to install and maintain software in your office. And because all your company information is stored at Genbook’s secure, backed-up storage facilities, you don’t have to worry about losing this vital information.

A partial list of Genbook’s features includes:

  • Online Scheduling of Appointments – Save yourself from the manual labor of entering appointments and maximize your schedule by letting customers book appointment themselves.
  • Verified Customer Reviews – Genbook encourages your customers to write reviews of their visits. You can then choose the best and easily promote them through social media and email to increase your business.
  • Customer and Staff Notifications – Your staff and customers receive automatic confirmation of appointments on their computer, tablet, or mobile device. They can be set up to automatically synchronize with Outlook, iCloud and other calendar programs, so appointments and schedules are always up to date.
  • Individual Staff Logins – Track and manage staff schedules and performance by giving each their own account on the system. They can see their own information and you can see the full picture of your business.
  • Customer Analytics – Use the Genbook dashboard to review customer information, appointment history, and business performance charts.
  • Cloud Backup – With your important business information stored in Genbook’s secure,  fully backed-up servers, you know your information is safe.

Getting Started with Genbook

Setting up your business on Genbook isn’t hard at all. I’ve walked through setting up a dummy business page (using the 30 Day Free Trial offer) so you can see how it works. To get started you fill out the few bits of information on the signup form and click the “Start 30 Day Free Trial” button. This takes you to a Genbook Calendar page like the one shown here:

Genbook Step 1

Next you’ll want to click the “Yes, show me what I need to configure” link. This opens the Get Started menu, which guides you through the rest of the steps to get your business online with Genbook.

Genbook Get Started Menu

As shown in the menu, click the “Add your business details” link. This opens the Contact details section of the Business Profile page, where you’ll enter information like your business name, address, and phone number, along with the name of a contact person. Save your changes and you’ll see the Get Started menu again.

Click the “Set your operating hours” link in the menu to open the Operating Hours section of the Business Profile page. Set your operating hours and click the Save Changes button. Genbook reopens the Get Started menu for you once your hours are successfully saved.

Click the “Add your services” link in the menu. This opens the Services section of the Business Profile page. Here you will define your new service by entering all the relevant information about it. Because there are so many options when you create a service, you may need to fill out one or more of the subsections under Services. These include:

  • Details
  • Collect Payments
  • Online Availability
  • Confirmation Message
  • Confirmation Attachment
  • Deals

Once you are done here, you will click the “Add your staff” link in the Get Started menu. This allows you to assign a staff member who can provide the service you are creating.

Finally, you’ll use the “Validate your email address” link in the Get Started menu to do exactly that.

When you finish with this step, you will be able to accept online appointments. However, you should consider making a test appointment to see how your page will look to your customers. You do this using the Setup tips menu, which replaces the Get Started menu once your email address is validated.

When you click the make a test appointment link in the menu, you’ll see something like the screen below (with your own information in it of course):

An Example Service on Genbook

While you can get started using just the information you see here, you can customize your Genbook pages by adding your company logo from the Setup tips menu.

When you are happy with your page, you can click the “Invite your customers to book online” link to send invitations using social media or email. Note that anyone you invite to book online will automatically be added to your customers Database. You can see this database by clicking the Customers tab at the top of the Booking Calendar page.

If you have a website, you can use the “Add a BookNow button to your site” link to generate the HTML or JavaScript code necessary to put a button on your site. Genbook helps you do this by providing instructions on how to add the code into a website, as discussed later in this review.

And that’s it. Your new service is online and ready for booking through Genbook!

Booking Appointments

Booking appointments is the heart of Genbook. Once you have the service set up as described previously, your customers can use your Scheduling Page URL or click a BookNow button on your website to set an appointment. They can choose any open slot in the schedule, as well as select the staff member they will meet with.

Once the appointment is set, both the customer and the selected staff member receive notifications of the new appointment. In addition, Genbook can send out reminders to the customer to decrease the likelihood of a no-show. You use the Appointment Reminders section of the Settings page to tell Genbook exactly how you want it to generate these reminders.

Genbook Appointment Reminder Options

While getting customers to book their own appointments online is ideal, sometimes you or your staff need to book appointments for them. These two different types of appointments are what Genbook refers to as online and offline appointments. As you’ve probably guessed, the online appointments are appointments that your customers book for themselves through the BookNow button or the Scheduling Page URL. Offline appointments are appointments that you or one of your staff enter into the system manually, while logged into Genbook on your computer.

The differences won’t affect your customers. They will get the same messages and information for each type. They are simply practical things like not sending you a notification that a new appointment has been made when it is an appointment that you just entered yourself.

Verified Customer Reviews

One of the best ways to increase your business is through customer reviews that are posted on your website or via social media. But many organizations manipulate these reviews by hiring people to create phony positive reviews and post them as if they were written by actual clients. Some companies even hire people to write negative reviews about their competitors in hopes of damaging their business!

Genbook attacks these problems head-on with their Verified Customer Reviews system. The system can contact your customers after their appointments and automatically collect and publish the reviews they write. Because these reviews are solicited from your customers, you virtually eliminate the problem of phony reviews. This activity is controlled by the Verified Customer Reviews page:

Genbook Verified Customer Reviews

Genbook notifies you whenever a customer submits a new review. You have the option whether or not to publish the review (they appear on your Calendar page), and can share the best ones to Facebook or Twitter with just a few clicks. Over time, the Verified Customer Reviews system can help your company grow.

Additional Features

Beyond the core features of Genbook, there are a number of powerful additional features that make this much more than just a simple scheduling program. Not only are these features powerful, they are all included in the cost of even the most basic Genbook plan. It’s one product where you don’t have to pay extra money to get the really good stuff.

Note: The Genbook Promote product that you may see mentioned in some other reviews has been discontinued.

You’ll definitely want to check out these features:

  • Integrated Payments with Genbook Payments
  • Special Deals with Genbook Offers
  • Mobile Apps for iOS and Android
  • Partnership with Constant Contact
  • Using Genbook with Your Facebook Page
  • Using Genbook with Groupon
  • Support for Website Builders
  • Enhanced Google Search

Integrated Payments with Genbook Payments

Genbook Payments is a system for billing your customers at the time that they make an appointment. It can collect payment in full or deposits, or it can record the customer’s credit card information so you can process the charge later. Genbook Payments works whether a customer is making an appointment using a mobile app or a web browser.

Genbook Integrated Payments

Information gathered by Genbook Payments is processed by Stripe, one of the leading online payment processing services. If your business doesn’t have a Stripe account, you can set one up in minutes. Then it is just a matter of connecting the Stripe account to your Genbook account and you are ready to go.

Well, not quite. Once you have Stripe and Genbook connected, you need to go to the Payments page in your Genbook Settings and tell Genbook how to deal with things like when to capture credit card info and what your cancellation policy is (assuming you have one).

This all looks good for when a customer is booking their own appointment, but what happens when you book them? In this case, you will be entering the appointment into the Genbook Calendar yourself. When you are setting up one of these offline appointments, you will see a Payments tab in the Add New Appointment window. Click that tab and fill in the customer’s credit card info. If your business provides recurring billing, you can set this up using the Recurring tab.

If you need a simple way to handle customer payments, Genbook Payments could be your answer.

Special Deals with Genbook Offers

Do you run deals, promotions, any kind of special offers in your business? If so, then Genbook Offers can make your life easier. Following a simple, three-step process you can create an Offer that people can schedule or purchase right from within your Genbook application.

Genbook Offers

Here are the three steps you need to complete to create your Offer. You should be aware that to do this, you need to be using Genbook Payments as well.

  1. Tell Genbook what service you are creating an Offer for. You can either base this on an existing service (a Mother’s Day discount on your standard pedicure service, for example), or create a completely new service to offer.
  2. Set the details of your Offer. Tell Genbook things like the new price, availability, and expiration date of the Offer. Once the system has these details, it will automatically generate basic text describing the offer. Then it will create the offer page that customers will see. You can customize this page by changing the text, color scheme, logo, and other details to match your business and encourage potential customers to take advantage of your offer.
  3. Genbook Offers will display the “final” Offer and Scheduling pages for you to review and edit as necessary.

Once your Offer is complete, you can manage it from the Dashboard. You’ll be able to view the Offer’s stats and sales figures, as well as make changes to the Offer itself.

Mobile Apps for iOS and Android

In early 2015, the company launched Genbook Manager. This app runs on iOS and Android devices and is designed to let you schedule and manage your business from your phone. The capabilities claimed for both versions are the same, and include:

  • Viewing, booking, and editing appointments
  • Tracking changes to your Genbook Calendar
  • Managing and publishing Verified Customer Reviews in real time
  • Sharing reviews on social media and by email marketing
  • Requesting customers to submit reviews
  • Access to customer contact details and appointment history

Reviews of these two apps on their respective app stores is mixed, with the iOS version getting higher ratings than the Android one. That said, many users at each store gave the products five-star ratings. Both versions are available free of charge, so you can easily try them out during the free trial period and decide for yourself.

Partnership with Constant Contact

Email marketing is a powerful way to keep your customers informed about your company and products. Despite the rise of social media, email is still one of the primary ways people communicate online. It is an inexpensive and effective way to reach your customers.

Email marketing is also measurable. That means you can easily monitor things like the percentage of people who open an email and the percentage that click a link (or your BookNow button) in the message. This allows you to see how effective your various marketing approaches are.

The trick is integrating email marketing into your business. To help you with this, Genbook has formed a partnership with Constant Contact®, a well-known email marketing company.

Constant Contact gives you the tools you need to get the best results from email marketing. Beyond the technology, they give you tons of resources to get you up to speed on the marketing side of things. These range from how-to articles, through videos, to online and in-person seminars and training courses.

If you don’t want to deal with all this stuff yourself, you can contract with Constant Contact for various services, up to and including creating your company marketing plan or running your entire email marketing operation.

Aside from this, there are a couple of tangible benefits to using Genbook and Constant Contact together. Just as your web designer can easily add the Genbook BookNow button to your website, you can add a BookNow button to your Constant Contact emails. And it is even easier to add the button to your Constant Contact emails than it is to add it to your website.

The other tangible benefit to using Genbook and Constant Contact together deals with managing your contacts. To run email marketing campaigns, Constant Contact needs a list of contacts to send the messages to. In this case, that means your Genbook customer contacts.

But how do you get your Genbook customer contacts into Constant Contact. Retyping everything would be error-prone and a huge waste of time. Thanks to integration work the two partners have done, you can export some or all of your customer contacts from Genbook directly into Constant Contact with just a few moments work. If some of these contacts are already in Contast Contact, they will be automatically updated when you do the import.

To make the Genbook / Constant Contact partnership even more desirable, Constant Contact customers can get a 25% discount on Genbook.

Using Genbook with Your Facebook Page

Facebook is a huge social media destination. It should also be one of the main destinations for your business’s social media marketing efforts. To make this easier, Facebook created something called a CTA (Call To Action) button. These buttons can appear on your Facebook business page, whether you are viewing it on a regular PC or on a mobile device.

The Genbook team recommends you add a CTA to your Facebook business page (You do have a Facebook business page, don’t you?) and link it to your Genbook Online Scheduling Page. The Genbook blog contains all the instructions you need to create your “Book Now” CTA button and how to connect it to your Online Scheduling Page.

Using Genbook with Groupon

Groupon is an e-commerce marketplace that connects its members to local businesses in hundreds of cities. Many people these days go to Groupon first when looking for a deal on products or services. If your business is located in one of the cities served by Groupon, you may want to promote your business on Groupon. According to the Groupon Q3 2015 Public Fact Sheet, in a June 2105 survey, 90% of merchants surveyed agree that Groupon brought in new customers.

Genbook is a Groupon Preferred Scheduling Partner. Because of this, your new or existing customers can go from your Groupon offer to directly scheduling appointments in Genbook. The integration of Genbook with Groupon allows you to take advantage of Groupon’s popularity, without using up a lot of staff time managing those offers.

To make sure you can get Genbook working smoothly with Groupon, the Genbook blog has detailed instructions for setting up an offer. While the process for setting up an offer on Groupon is a little more complex than setting up a BookNow button on a website, it is still relatively easy. You’ll need to set up your offer in Genbook, then connect that offer to Groupon. Once you do that, a Groupon representative will get everything set up on their end and let you know when your offer can go live.

Support for Website Builders

The fewer steps it takes a website visitor to schedule an appointment, the more likely they are to do so. When a visitor can simply click a button on your website to schedule, you will get the maximum number of appointments possible. Genbook’s BookNow button is a great way to allow visitors to your website to schedule an appointment as quickly and easily as possible. But that begs the question of how to get the BookNow button to appear on your website.

Genbook has taken steps to make this as easy as possible. The system that generates your button creates code that is compatible with standard websites. In their blog, Genbook includes general instructions for adding the BookNow button to websites by inserting custom HTML or JavaScript into the website’s source code.

To make it even easier to use the BookNow button, Genbook has also posted detailed, step-by-step instructions for adding the button to websites made with several popular website building tools. At the time of this review, you could find detailed instructions for using the button with website building tools from the following companies and organizations:

  • AMTA (the American Massage Therapy Association)
  • GoDaddy
  • Weebly
  • Wix
  • WordPress

While the exact details for getting this done vary for each, it typically only takes no more than five or six steps to create the button and add it to your site. As an experienced WordPress user, I’ve examined Genbook’s instructions for adding a BookNow button to a WordPress page. I can’t imagine any way they could make the process simpler, short of sending one of their people to your office to do it for you!

Enhanced Google Search

Late in 2015, Genbook partnered with Google to allow customers to book appointments directly from within Google Search results. As you can imagine, allowing people to book appointments right from the search page could lead to more bookings. The results of this integration look something like the following:

Genbook Enhanced Google Search

At the time of this review, Genbook had not published a lot of information about this feature. If you feel that this would be a valuable feature for your business, you should sign up for the free 30 day trial that Genbook offers, then contact their support team for more information.

Resources for Learning More

Genbook provides a few different resources you can use when you need more information about some aspect of the product. To reach them, you will need to be logged into your account and looking at the Calendar page. Click your name in the top right corner of the Calendar. That will open the following menu:

Genbook User Menu

Clicking the “Support” link takes you to the Support page. There you can find answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) along with tips and tricks for getting the most out of Genbook. You’ll also find a link to submit a support message, as we as links to the Genbook Twitter feed, Facebook page, and blog.

The blog in particular is full of useful information, although it can be hard to find exactly what you want in it. I suggest you start with the specific article linked from this page. Only if you don’t find what you need in those articles should you look for it in the blog.

How Much Will Genbook Cost You?

The pricing for Genbook seems very reasonable. It is based solely on the number of staff members who will have accounts on the system. There are no artificial limits on the number of appointments you can make, and you can use all the features of the service regardless of which price tier you are in. At the time of this review, the pricing was as follows:

  • Solo Plan (1 person) $20 per month
  • Standard Plan (2-5 people) $40 per month
  • Team Plan (6-50 people) $70 per month

Conclusion

Genbook is a scheduling program for local businesses that has a lot going for it. It handles all the basic functions you would expect from a scheduling program, and adds in additional features that help you market and manage your business. With more than 20,000 users serving more than 6 million customers, the system is clearly robust and successful.

But is it right for your business?

The best way to find out is to try it out for yourself. This is where Genbook’s 30 Day Free Trial offer comes into play. As you saw when I walked you through the steps of setting up a sample business on Genbook, it will only take you minutes to get your business online and find out if this is the right scheduling service for you. Why not do it right now? To get started, simply fill out the form at the bottom of this page.

Read more about Genbook on DiscoverCloud or our knowledge base.

By Bill Mann | 1/11/2016 | Product Analysis

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