Appointment Reminder vs GoReminders: Which is More Powerful and Easy-to-Use?

Power up your business with GoReminders, an appointment-booking platform that is truly easy to use.

Browse any appointment-booking platform and it’s likely to have marketed itself as being “easy to use.” Appointment Reminder is no different, promising an “intuitive interface [that] helps you schedule appointment reminders with ease.”

We put that claim to the test by creating an Appointment Reminder account and trying out its main features. Unfortunately, we encountered many hiccups while trying to create appointments and client reminders on its platform. These ranged from bugs to confusing settings, and even a spelling error in the navigation, as you’ll learn about in this article.

These issues suggest a lack of attention to detail, which could explain the general difficulty we faced in using Appointment Reminder’s platform.

At GoReminders, we similarly market our appointment scheduling software as being easy to use. Unlike our experience with Appointment Reminder, however, we can confidently vouch for the fact that our platform actually is easy to use! Here’s why:

Simple and Intuitively Designed Interface

We know that scheduling appointments isn’t your main business, so we’ve made navigating our appointment-booking app a breeze. Sign up for a GoReminders account, fill out a short appointment form and you’ll have your first appointment set up in 10 seconds.

All our key features are prominently listed in the dashboard for easy access, so you don’t have to spend time hunting them down. Not only that: we’ve named our features and settings intuitively so it’s clear what they are for. For instance, you’ll find your appointment settings under the “Appointments” tab, and booking requests under the “Booking” tab. If you have a question about our platform, get in touch through our in-app support button or a phone call, and our fantastic customer support team will be right with you.

On the other hand, Appointment Reminder’s interface is rather complicated. For one, you’re inundated with many settings as you review the header menu. In addition, while you might be able to accept the misspelling of the “Availability” setting, the ambiguously named settings might stump you.

As an example, the difference between the “Booking Pages” and “Question Form” settings isn’t immediately obvious, and there doesn’t seem to be much explanation on this in the documentation or elsewhere. Some settings are also named in puzzling ways, such as “IsActive.” This sounds more like language meant for a robot—and not a human like yourself.

Appointment Reminder’s documentation is also quite sparse, making it difficult to troubleshoot issues on your own. All this results in a steeper learning curve when you’re setting up Appointment Reminder, and quite possibly a more frustrating experience while using it.

Hassle-Free Calendar Integrations

View your appointments in GoReminders or your favorite calendar app—the choice is yours.

While we provide a built-in calendar for viewing your appointments on our platform, we also integrate with popular calendar apps such as Google Calendar, iCal, Apple Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. This helps you view your GoReminders appointments directly from your calendar app of choice. The syncing process will take only a few clicks, and you’re free to customize the information that we send to your calendar app.

Appointment Reminder also integrates with various calendar apps, but not as well as we do. When we synced our Google Calendar appointments to Appointment Reminder, for example, Appointment Reminder strangely added the names of our appointments to our customer database within its platform. As a result, our list of customers in Appointment Reminder became populated with names like “Spa with Katie” and “Call Mr. Stevens during lunchtime.”

We had to manually delete such “customers” from our list one by one afterward—which is something that you, as a busy business owner, probably don’t want to spend time doing.

Effortless Client Reminders

Booking an appointment is only half the story—you have to get your customers to show up, too. With GoReminders, it’s easy to send up to three text reminders and/or three email reminders to gently nudge your customers about their upcoming appointments.

Simply compose your reminder messages as Reminder Templates, and specify when they are to be sent. You can then send your Reminder Templates according to a preset Reminder Schedule, such as immediately after scheduling an appointment, as far ahead as 30 days before the appointment, or even as soon as one hour before it.

To set up multiple reminders for a single appointment, use our handy Message Sequence feature. With it, you can customize the Reminder Templates that will be sent according to a particular Reminder Schedule, and effortlessly create various combinations of reminder messages and sending schedules to fit every appointment. GoReminders users have reported being able to cut their no-show rates to as low as one or two per year.

While Appointment Reminder offers a similar client reminder feature, it isn’t as intuitive to use. The default reminder option is to send a “script”, namely a single message. To send multiple reminders, you’d have to create a “sequence” of messages, which is similar to our Message Sequence feature.

Using your sequence in Appointment Reminder, though, can be a bit of a head-scratcher: it involves selecting the sequence from the “when to send reminder” field when you set up or edit an appointment. A “when to send reminder” field will typically contain options such as “1 hour before” or “4 days before” (and for Appointment Reminder, it does). However, it’s just not a place that instinctively comes to mind as you’re trying to activate your sequences.

Flexible, Scalable Mass-Messaging

Apart from sending automated text messages, you may need to broadcast ad hoc messages to your customers. This could be for promoting a one-time discount to all customers, or informing certain customers of a venue change, for instance. In situations like these, use our Message Blasts feature to mass-message customers via a text blast and/or email blast.

Blast your messages to only one customer, all of them or only a specified group of customers—the flexibility of our Message Blasts will help you reach the right audience for your message without fuss.

However, Appointment Reminder’s bulk-messaging feature is more rigid. When setting up your bulk message, you can select your recipients only based on their appointment date. This works for mass-messaging customers whose appointments fall within a certain date range, but not if you’re looking to contact customers who have been categorized in other ways.

Add a Touch of Personalization to Your Messages

With GoReminders, you will make your customers feel valued by personalizing your messages.

Customers love being treated like VIPs, so elevate the customer experience by addressing your customers by name in your reminders  and Message Blasts. You can do so by tapping on our Template Tags, which are information placeholders for inserting in your GoReminders messages. We dynamically populate the Template Tags with your customers’ information so your messages will sound as if they are coming from a friend.

Template Tags for essential information, such as your customer’s name and their appointment date, are included by default in every GoReminders account. You can also create your own Template Tags to suit your business’ unique needs, such as a Template Tag that inserts a virtual meeting link for an upcoming online class.

On the other hand, Appointment Reminder’s placeholders (called “tokens”) can be challenging to use. While the software offers six custom fields, it appears that only three of them can be edited. In addition, these custom fields can be used only in message sequences, and not bulk messages.

Appointment Reminder’s custom fields are also generically numbered, and renaming them seems impossible. This could make it difficult to remember what the custom fields are.

Appointment Reminder vs GoReminders: The Verdict

While many appointment-booking platforms will represent their software as being easy to use, not all of them will live up to such claims. With Appointment Reminder’s interface being generally difficult to understand and navigate, businesses may have a tough time using it—especially since the platform’s documentation is rather thin.

There are also various bugs and kinks in the platform that further detract from the user experience. All in all, Appointment Reminder comes across as a half-finished product that may not be fit for purpose.

In contrast, GoReminders offers powerful appointment-booking features in a truly easy-to-use platform, making it the clear choice. Our users in various industries have seen significant reductions in their no-show rates—and your business could be the next success story! Try GoReminders risk free by signing up for a free 14-day trial here (credit card not required).