Zoho Corp is an Indian multinational technology company with more than 12,000 employees. It offers many popular products, including the Zoho Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform and Zoho Mail, as well as a whole host of lesser-known products, such as Zoho Bookings (opens in new tab).
A trio of entrepreneurs – Sridhar Vembu, Tony Thomas and Sreenivas Kanumuru – founded Zoho in 1996. Vembu has been the CEO of the company since its inception and has overseen its growth from a small software company to a multi-billion dollar company.
Zoho Bookings: Subscriptions and Pricing
Zoho Bookings is a freemium app. Anyone can sign up for the free version and start receiving appointments from clients after setting up their booking website. However, this version has many limitations, for example you cannot accept payments from customers or send appointment reminders.
You need a paid subscription to get the most out of Zoho Bookings, and the platform offers two such subscriptions; Basic and Premium. The former costs $8 per user per month and the latter costs $12 per user per month. You can also pay a 25% annual discount on the usual monthly price.
You can take advantage of the 15-day trial period to test each plan before making a final decision. If you are not satisfied after your purchase, you have 30 days to request a full refund for the monthly subscription and 45 days for the annual subscription.
Zoho Bookings: Features
You need to create a Zoho account to use any of the services, and you can easily do that with an email or phone number. After that, you can access your Zoho Bookings dashboard and start setting up a unique booking website for your business.
The first thing to do is enter basic information about your company such as name, email and available working days, and specify your company’s working hours. Any visitor who comes to your booking website will see the information about your business and will only be able to schedule appointments during the specific working hours you select.
Zoho assigns a unique subdomain associated with the zohobookings.com domain name for each user’s booking website. For example, a company called John Doe has JohnDoe.zohobookings.com as its URL. The good thing is you can choose any subdomain name, until now another user has not used it yet.
You can take it one step further by using a personal domain name (eg JohnDoe.com) as your booking page URL, but this feature is only available to Premium subscribers. Once you’re done describing your company’s information and working hours, you’re ready to go. You can share the URL with clients and they can visit it to book meetings directly.
The Zoho Bookings platform allows you to extensively customize your company’s booking page. You can change the theme to visually differentiate your business from competitors or to customize the form fields you use to receive information from customers.
If your business needs payment to schedule appointments, you can easily arrange it with Zoho Bookings. The platform allows you to receive payments directly from customers, thanks to integration with third-party payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal.
You can also send personalized appointment confirmations to every customer who books an appointment or send automated reminders to make sure they don’t miss their meeting.
Zoho Bookings: Interface and Use
You can access Zoho Bookings through the web interface or mobile app (iOS or Android). In our opinion, the platform’s user interface needs a lot of improvements. It is quite messy and therefore difficult to navigate.
Zoho Bookings: Support
Zoho offers direct customer support for paid users via phone, live chat or email. However, we have observed a pattern of complaints that the company’s support representatives are often slow to respond.
On the plus side, the Zoho Bookings app has a Knowledge Base that you can access from your dashboard. This Knowledge Base is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of the platform that will help you navigate the platform with ease.
Zoho Bookings: The Competition
Well-known alternatives to Zoho Bookings are Setmore (opens in new tab)Appoint.ly and Square Appointments (opens in new tab). We consider Zoho Bookings to be a superior tool due to its comprehensive feature set.
Zoho Bookings: Final Verdict
If you want to arrange appointments with customers as easily as possible, Zoho Bookings is a smart choice. The main benefits of the platform are the ability to customize your booking page and receive payments from customers through third-party payment gateways. However, we noticed some drawbacks such as the limited customer support.
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