Robert Clay Vineyards review for Appointment Booking App | BTA

Oct. 14, 2021

The app is great for accomplishing a lot of complex setups, but it has two major design problems that won't allow businesses that have tasting rooms, like a brewery or winery to use the app. Unfortunately, they don't have a way to provide feedback or request product enhancements to the developers either. I found their support to be very condescending at times, and they tend to treat you like you're an idiot rather than try to help you understand their product. The app makes the assumption that a staff member can't handle appointments/reservations of a capacity of more than one person. I get that makes sense for a lot of businesses, but I think that decision should be up to the end-user and not enforced by the app. Like most small tasting rooms we are limited in staff so we need to be able to not allow people to book appointments for a tasting if our staff is out of the office or busy, and the app determines staff free/busy time by syncing with any calendar app that supports iCal, which is a really nice feature. But there is no way other than associating a staff member to an appointment type to block out a time slot based on staff availability unless you associate that staff member to the appointment type. Once you do that you've limited the number of people that can attend an appointment to 1 person because one staff member is limited to a capacity of 1. Like most small tasting rooms we only have one bar where we do private tastings, and it seats 8 people, so when we schedule a private tasting we limit it to 8, but again, we can't both limit appointments based on staff availability AND the capacity of our tasting room bar, it's one or the other. If they would just fix staff resources so we could define the capacity a staff can handle then everything would work just fine, but they refuse to even consider it from my discussions with them so far. Their only recommendation was to use equipment in place of staff because if you can set capacity on equipment, but the equipment type doesn't allow you to associate a free/busy calendar to it. Their underlying schema must support capacity for staff because when you export staff from the product to CSV there is a capacity/inventory column that is set to 1 for staff, but they said it's hardcoded and can't be changed (I already tried importing with the Inventory set to 8, and it just reset it back to 1). And there's no way to file enhancement requests to their development team. Honestly, the product is so powerful I really find it hard to believe that there isn't a way to accomplish what I need, but to date, their support has been of little help trying to help me solve it, and they no longer offer paid install/configuration support so you're going to be stuck figuring out difficult setups by yourself because their support gets impatient really quick if there isn't an easy answer to your problem...I've practically begged to pay them in the past and they have no interest at all. The primary reason I'm giving it a 2-star rating is because of their support and unwillingness to accept product feedback or enhancement request other than filing a support ticket, which to date just keeps getting closed with the resolution that the product can't do what I need. And their unwillingness to do provide custom support even if you're willing to pay for it. It's very possible that I was just unlucky and happened to get the same person every time I opened a ticket, but I've opened quite a few tickets over the past several months and I had the same experience each time. I'm not giving up yet, mostly because there aren't many better options, and I'm just hoping with a little more tweaking I'll figure something out. This all said, if I was the type of business like the ones they discuss in a lot of their examples, I probably would have had a much better experience and a lot fewer problems. I could see giving it a 4 star, maybe a 5-star rating if I didn't have to talk to their support and I was running a hair or nail salon. Also, take a minute to read all the responses to any reviews that didn't give a 4-star or higher rating and that will be the type and tone of responses you will get from their support when you run into tougher problems to solve. I would guess that there are probably a much higher percentage of people that use their products that never have to deal with support, if you're one of them then you probably love the product.