When looking for an online booking system, it’s easy to go with the largest, most advertised service but that’s not always the best option for your business.
The main features any service business should look for when selecting a software solution is to make sure it does exactly what you need AND you like the way it works. A lot of software is sold on promises and fancy sales pages rather than on user experience – when at the end of the day, YOU are going to be using it, so it’s important that it works the way you like it.
MindBodyOnline is an extensive, well-marketed online booking software service that was originally built and marketed to yoga studios but has expanded to service businesses with classes and appointments like massage therapists, chiropractors, spas, hair salons and dance studios. Along the way it seems they’ve gone through some growing pains in offering seamless service in all these verticals.
Yocale offers many of the same online booking features that Mindbody does and we’ve noticed a trend of clients coming to us looking for a better alternative after their experience with MB has not met their expectations.
Reasons why Mindbody Clients switch to Yocale:
Pricing: Mindbody has a very attractive starting point price for business but very soon the additional add-ons of select features start adding up. Another pricing complaint is that Mindbody is billed in US$ – for Canadians, this means prices have been raised significantly over the last year. Set up fees, monthly tech support costs and it’s third party hosting and/or 3rd party components tools it requires for your business add a lot to the base monthly price as well.
User Interface: Mindbody is packed with features targeting different businesses which has resulted in a very complex application with a steep learning curve. User experience has become poor and things don’t run smoothly together. As one user put it “ Mindbody has a really bad user interface, almost similar to win95 – way too many clicks to get something done and very confusing at times.” The current MB booking widget requires third party tools to add into an existing website and often is confusing for users, especially in appointment-based businesses because the system default is for booking classes.
Tech Support: One of the pains of a fast-growing company is customer support. Mindbody has lost many customers due to their lack of technical support. Through forums and customer reviews, I’ve noted over 40+ upset clients complaining about many hour-long tech calls that yielded no solution to their problem. Mindbody does provide premium tech support option but at a very high monthly fee.
Limited Marketing App: Basically with the Mindbody Connect marketplace, you’re being listed against your competitors. That’s one thing that at Yocale, we work really hard to increase your marketing with complementary referrals, not competitive listings. Also, the MB marketplace is only mobile-app driven which means that traffic, users and clicks don’t affect SEO (ie: Google rankings etc.) At Yocale, our online marketplace is both on online search portal and a mobile app, when someone searches, books an appointment, likes or reviews your service, that directly affects your web profile status. It’s valuable SEO-building data we use to your advantage. Our clients have noticed a significant rise in their Google search ranking within a couple months of joining.
Businesses purchase a CRM system like MindBody to increase efficiency, but when problems and pricing start increasing your workload, it’s time to look somewhere else. Here’s another customer testimonial that that shows that Mindbody was creating more dysfunction, than function in their business. Quote: “I think you would need a fulltime employee just to interact with the (Mindbody) software because everything requires a lot of configurations, which is caused by the bad UI and logic behind it. To me as a tech guy, it seemed as if every feature was built with different logic at different times by different people and at the end someone tried to put them all together and patch the gaps in between and that causes user flow not to be consistent.” and another user review, “I have years of experience using enterprise apps but I can’t find my way around MindBody, it’s confusing”
Switching from one system may seem like a headache but that’s the beauty of CRM systems, your database of clients, services and providers is all held in basically one spreadsheet. Transferring the data is a quick and easy process of moving that spreadsheet into a new system, just like buying a new phone and your data gets instantly uploaded to the new model, the work goes on behind the scenes to make sure everything runs seamlessly. Nobody wants to spend hours on the phone with tech support, or stay up past midnight staring frustrated at their bright computer screen, that’s what complete data-migration support is for.
Not every MindBody customer is the perfect fit for Yocale. Mindbody has created a solution helping thousands of businesses run very complex operations with their application, and many companies are very happy with their software solutions. For businesses between 1-40 service providers that are in allied health, beauty and all appointment-based industries, Yocale offers a very completing solution at an extremely reasonable price point that is easy to get started, and a streamlined user experience for you and your clients. We can help grow your business.