Zen Planner Reviews 332

Great customer service. Knowledgable staff and always happy to help with our business's needs. The ZP system can be complex and once learned, it works very well.

For the most part the software is user friendly. However it is not always accurate and lacks some important functionality like being able to put family members into different programs.

Plan on long wait times and getting hung up on when you need technical assistance. The staffers are very pleasant and helpful but it is fairly common to wait 30+ minutes on a call and then have the system say "sorry... please call back later". This was a constant frustration for my staff. When brought to the companies attention their gist of their answer was "we're surprised to hear that because we have world class customer service".

When you get ready to change to a different platform expect high fees for exporting data and don't expect to go easily. I started the process in Feb and it took 3 months because their links didn't work they way they were supposed to and there were delays in resending the links, etc... When I asked them to credit the last $110 because of the difficulties involved (and I have the emails to prove it) they basically dismissed the request. Which is fine... it's only $110. But it was the straw that pushed me to write the review when I might otherwise have just walked away and not told anybody about the bad customer service.

Greatly appreciate you guys taking the time to have us in to ask questions. Amazing resource...know that this is extremely valued and does wonders to build a positive and PRODUCTIVE relationship. Cheers!!!

There are some things it does well. But there are many things that are lacking, that really ought to work.

There are a number of common business practices that it doesn't support by itself -- fairly standard ways of doing monthly account billing, or signing up for memberships that start at the beginning of the month, or scheduling appointments in perpetuity but paying for them monthly.

You can always run a custom report to get what you need - except when you need info from two tables and neither type of report can get at the other table.

You can do things with batch updates - except when the thing you need to update isn't available to batch update.

There are significant usability issues in all aspects of the system. In the administrative back-end, staff can learn to work around these problems, although they lead to very tedious workflows (EVERYTHING is several clicks away). For the customer-facing side, new customers constantly get confused by the interface. Keeping up with customer requests and making sure membership and schedule data are current and intact is a full-time job.

Zen Planner is better than nothing, but the overhead is quite significant. Expect it to be a big impact on your staff's workload.

Edit: I'm amused by all the five-star ratings that say that tech support is so great. Well-designed software is usable on its own without having to call tech support every week.

Have been with Zen Planner since 2015, it’s software is very user friendly but unfortunately they have some flaws that for some reason sometimes they multiple charge my students or don’t charge at all. It will happen once in a while and when that happen, their costumer service become very slow and dismissive, they will send you to the processor and the processor will send you back to them. For instance, now, I have been asking to talk to a supervisor for days and they simply don’t call and when I call to reach someone no one is ever available. It is very unfortunate because as I said the system is very user friendly, but they are not trust worth.

Following up:
Zen Planner gave me notice of cancelation after I refused to remove this review. Based on the problems I have had with them, I already had in mind and was searching for a more reliable system. Unfortunately I was forced to do it rushed, I have been trusting all my billing transactions and contacts to Zen Planner, and this transfer process does take a long time. Nick, one of the supervisors dealt with this situation very unprofessionally, focusing on make me remove my review rather then fix the real issue, treatned a few times and finally just gave me notice. I have never seen this before... I can’t stress enough that you can’t trust such important information for your business in such hands.

ZenPlanner a step in the right direction.

We have been using ZenPlanner in our Early Childhood Education Center for 5 months now. Before we were doing enrollment by paper. Because we aren't a gym it was a little funky setting up our systems at first but in most ways, ZenPlanner has worked well for our program. It has lots of functions which helps customize it to our specific needs. However, the limited custom fields makes it difficult to meet all the licensing requirements for child files. We wish that you could access student information offline incase of emergency. The parent user face isn't esthetically pleasing and can be confusing to our parents. And we would love it if it integrated with Quickbooks.

Overall, ZenPlanner was a huge step in the right direction for our program but we aren't completely in love with it.

Onboarding with Zen Planner when opening a CrossFit "box" was pretty simple, features and functionality were good (and continually improving), support was always pretty solid throughout my time administering the system, and I had a voice as a user and a customer.

Very user friendly, and great customer help!!

This is a great system.

easy to use, when I have a question customer service is awesome

Zen Planner is great. Has all the functions I need to run my business and their customer support is awesome.

software is buggy and cumbersome. would not recommend

very easy software to use, very helpful and supportive staff and customer service. they make organizing, planning, and establishing processes easy

I love working with my guy during on boarding and email support! He understands the struggles and knows what I'm needing when I need it. As I've grown, rolled in to the second month of business, needed to find that AMRAP button, etc. He is right there!

Overall Studio works well. The Retail functionality along with the Staff App need a lot of work. Payment processing and member tracking are the relative strong suits for what is offered but there are a lot of little things that could be improved.

The customer service is great and I should use it more frequently. If I have had a problem, they have always been available and incredibly helpful. The times that I have had a "problem" with Zen Planner have all been "user errors!" I wish there was a training course that met weekly or bi-weekly to cover the ins and outs of ZP, as I know we do not take advantage of all it has to offer.

ZP does most of the functions we need. Over the years we have figured out how to make reports and such as needed, however it is a difficult process to navigate unless you only use their premade ones. Creating events is easy, but then finding out who is registered is more complex for example. However, I find customer service very helpful and on the occasions I couldn't click around to find what I need they always help me within a few days. I use the Dashboard to see who is expiring, who owes us money, etc and that is all really helpful and easy to understand.

Love the program. It definitely has a steepish learning curve but ZP offers plenty of assistance to resolve most of not all issues. I wish reporting was a little easier to build custom reports. I also wish percentage of max lifts were more readily available to my clients in class from the Faceboard. Everything else functions like it should and works efficiently!

First few months - Excellant.

Has only been a few months but have been impressed with the product and especially the level of support. A couple of little transition hiccups which can be expected but the way they have dealt with them has been exceptional.