How to evaluate a booking system for a practice

A demo is a guided tour of a product's strengths, given by someone who knows exactly which paths look good. That is not dishonest — it is what a demo is for. It just makes a demo a poor basis for a decision, because the things that will annoy you daily are all outside the tour.

The procedure below inverts the process. You establish your requirement first, then test the product yourself, then use the vendor call only for the questions you cannot answer alone.

Step 1 — Write down the handoffs you need owned

Before looking at anything, list the points in your appointment journey that currently depend on a person remembering: after-hours booking, written confirmation, reminders, unconfirmed follow-up, deposits, refilling late cancellations, recall.

That list is your requirement. Written down first, it protects you from the most common evaluation failure — being sold something excellent at a handoff you had already covered, while the handoff that is actually costing you stays open.

Step 2 — Book an appointment yourself, on a phone

Every serious vendor has either a live demo booking flow or customers with public booking pages. Find one and use it as a client would, on a phone, without a salesperson narrating.

• Count the taps from arriving to holding a slot. Anything past about five is losing bookings.
• Note every field you are asked for, and ask yourself whether your clients would supply it.
• Check whether real availability is shown or a request is submitted for confirmation.
• Look at the confirmation that arrives, and time it.

Step 3 — Test the failure paths

Products are alike when everything goes right. They differ enormously when something goes wrong, and this is where an hour of your own testing outperforms any amount of vendor material.

• Abandon a booking halfway. Does anything remember you, or is the attempt simply gone?
• Cancel a booked appointment as a client. Is it possible without phoning?
• Reschedule one. Count the steps.
• Try to book a slot that has just been taken, and see what the collision looks like.

Step 4 — Ask what happens when nobody responds

Nearly every product sends reminders. Very few do anything about the appointments that ignore them. Ask directly: can I see today's unconfirmed appointments as a list, and does the system treat them differently from confirmed ones?

If the answer is that reminders go out and that is the extent of it, you are buying a notification service. That may be all you need — but price it as one.

Step 5 — Establish what integrates, in which direction

Integration is the word that hides the most variance in this category. Get specific, because a one-way integration produces double entry for as long as you own the product.

1. 01Does a booking made online appear in the practice management diary automatically, without anyone copying it?
2. 02Does a change made in the diary update what the online flow offers?
3. 03Are client records matched to existing clients, or created as duplicates?
4. 04Which specific version of your practice software is supported, and by whom — the vendor, a third party, or nobody?

Step 6 — Ask what you keep if you leave

This question is unwelcome on a sales call and worth asking anyway, because the answer determines your negotiating position for every year afterwards.

• Who owns the client records, and can you export them in full, including booking history?
• Does the booking flow run on your domain or on a vendor subdomain? A vendor subdomain means the URL your clients bookmark is not yours.
• What happens to your booking page the day you stop paying?
• Is pricing per seat, per location or per booking, and what does that cost look like if you grow by half?

Where products tend to run out is not features but connection: each one owns its own handoff well and knows nothing about the others, so the practice ends up as the integration layer between four subscriptions. Whether that matters depends entirely on how many handoffs were on your step-one list.