Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. Gainsight PX

IBM analytics has continued to improve upon the days of being the original core metrics. After using the updated version for quite some time, it has been great at providing the needed analytics to measure ROI and goal performance for our quarterly KPI's. It has resulted in a great increase in web engagements although we are a midsize company, smaller outfits may not need such an expensive option.

Incentivized

Gainsight PX is well suited for companies that are looking to measure customer engagement, usage, and adoption of their products and services. It is also well suited for companies that are looking to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences. Gainsight PX can be used to track customer journeys and measure customer satisfaction.

On the other hand, Gainsight PX is less appropriate for companies that are looking to measure sales performance or customer lifetime value. It is also not well suited for companies that are looking to measure customer retention or customer churn.

Incentivized

• IBM CXA comprises an acquisition called Tealeaf. This tool has deep heritage and this is evident in its present-day capabilities.
• The Universal Behaviour Exchange or UBX puts the concept of personalisation at the forefront. The ability to combine physical (analog) and digital transactions to create the complete picture of a customer journey, is a stand out benefit.
• The solution does not have to involve the purchase of software. IBM CXA can be sold as a service bundled with analytics as a service. This not only lowers the cost of ownership, it gets around one of the principal issues. Strong staff with design and analytical capability to drive the solution and deliver tangible benefits.
• The seamless integration of Watson AI services to help with the heavy lifiting. Watson reinforces the analytical focus this solution has and can learn to recognise situations specific to a company.

Incentivized

• Backfilling data. Many tools do not have the ability to be tracking elements once they are available and then pull it in and have historical views. You're not starting from scratch once you identify something.
• Educational Engagements. There are a ton of options for in-app messaging and its very customizable and easy to set up.
• Product Mapper. Organizing and shifting structure is easy to change. Setting multiple rules on a feature and confirming what you tagged is easy to do.

Incentivized

• The user interface is in Flash, which can be very frustrating and slow at times. Apparently, this is to be transitioned in a future release.
• Can only segment the last 93 days of data. Any historical segmentation beyond the 93 days must be run in Explore (which is credit based, and has its own limitations with the number of credits per month, based on the initial contract with IBM).
• Reports can only display 93 days of data at a given time for custom date ranges. There are pre-programmed date ranges setup with IBM during implementation (last week, last month, last quarter etc.), but are not flexible enough to answer more specific questions.
• Certain reports cannot have segments applied, making answering some simple questions a bit more tricky. For example, I can create a segment around mobile devices and apply it to the marketing channels report, but I can't create a marketing channel segment and apply it to the mobile reports.
• Built in API calls allows for nice report design and automation.

• Walk through functionality is weaker than other providers. If you ask a user to do something on screen, and that action reloads the page, the tour closes. This shortcoming is the primary cause for us using another walkthrough tool.
• There is no global CSS styling for PX modals. When I make a new CSS refinement, it's limited to that one engagement only. Everytime I have a new message to deliver, I know picking a correct tour type, finding a good starting place in existing CSS and content, working over the CSS to handle new content will all take more time that it takes in other tools with universal styling controls.
• The page reload tour cancelation also affects surveys. Want to send a CES survey after a user clicks a button that causes a URL change? You can't. Indirectly, you can load the survey if the user has clicked the button < 1 day ago, and is on URL X. If the URL is the same before and after the button click, even this work around wont work.
• Not sure how effective PX is on mobile, the functionality did not exist while we were building our mobile app, and we've yet to add it in.
• Would be nice if it could integrate our knowledge base, but only one KB vendor was supported (not our Freshdesk) last I looked

Incentivized

IBM Digital Analytics is a great solution for our clients and I believe they offer the best solution for the retail space. We have access to IBM support via email or live chat and they can answer many of the reporting questions that come up. IBM is receptive to our feedback of the product so I am confident they will continue making improvements

I like the product, find it pretty easy to use. As we move forward, looking forward to using more of the functionality.

Incentivized

Very easy to implement and use.

Never had any issues

As reports are templated, the system is pretty quick. Sometimes you have to wait a bit for a report to render. Or you might have to re-load the page. But there is no real issue here and the system is on par with other similar systems.

Overall, the level of support is very good and I would say it is a strong asset of the solution. However, you can sometimes feel that there is a difference of level among the support team.

I have not had to contact support frequently but when I have I used the chat and my questions were answered immediately. I've also used their knowledge center, help documentation and training videos which are all very thorough. The support we've received from our Customer Success Manager has been helpful as well.

Incentivized

Online training is really great. One of the best assets that they have. Lots of great videos, pop quizzes at the end of each module. Fantastic. Other tools have similar features, but not as good.

See previous comment: reading and understanding the encyclopedic implementation guide is a must.

Much of the work we did in IBM Digital Analytics could have been answered through Google Analytics, a much simpler, agile and FREE solution set. Not mention, given the vast number of Google Analytics USERS, free and actionable support is simply a click away ... this compared to IBM Digital Analytics fractured and often absent support service.

Heap has a great value proposition and very nice user experience. But it lacks the clear funnel analysis that Gainsight PX provides. Plus Heap also does not have integration with a lot of CRMs and Customer data platforms. Also, Additionally if you go in the market to find Heap implementors or SI vendors, you won't find any.

Incentivized

This solution can support large amount of data and transaction. The way that user management features are built, it shows it is meant for large organizations.

• We spend too much time trying to work around bugs on the new UI.
• We spend too much time trying to figure out how to make certain segments work because support and the knowledge center are lackluster.
• Our sales rep is very unresponsive and leaves us searching for a lot of answers on our own, including what other products we may benefit from that IBM offers.

Incentivized

• Allow us to integrate actual product usage with Salesforce.
• Too much developer time went into it, especially when the premise was that this was mostly going to be handled by the Product team. This was mostly because the Gainsight PX event editor doesn't support more complex querying on events.

Incentivized