Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation) is a scalable, SaaS-based, cross-channel, digital marketing platform providing digital marketers the ability to implement and manage email, mobile, social, and lead management campaign processes.
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QlikView
Score 7.9 out of 10
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QlikView® is Qlik®’s original BI offering designed primarily for shared business intelligence reports and data visualizations. It offers guided exploration and discovery, collaborative analytics for sharing insight, and agile development and deployment.
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Pricing
Acoustic Campaign
QlikView
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
QlikView
Custom
per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acoustic Campaign
QlikView
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
On an perpetual license basis, based on server plus number of users.
Contact vendor for pricing.
Silverpop is a powerful and comprehensive tool for digital marketers, and is apprprioate for companies of varying sizes, as well as both B2B and B2C models. It's particularly well-suited for companies with large, accurate customer databases and the ability to track customer actions on their websites to use as marketing automation triggers.
Sales data validations have helped manage our justifications in the past, especially with regard to new product development and new business introduction. It has also been helpful in identifying trends with business impact and direction specific to quarter and monthly sales from ERP data as well as decisions to purchase equipment of staffing based on run rates and product demand.
One thing that can get out of hand is data output - if you aren't careful in your query, you may be overloaded with data dumps and drown in the amount of info you have to filter through. This is a user caution, not a comment on the software itself.
Automated Messages - we currently have over 70 automated messages going out on any particular day through feeds and API calls that we pass to Silverpop. We rely on these automated messages to communicate to our customers and can rely on Silverpop to always be up and running to get these messages out.
Robust query building - We can target customers easily based on a combination of demographic profile data, as well as email and site behavior and purchase behavior, allowing us to finely segment our audience
Deep dive reporting - the UI reporting, as well as the available reports to download through the API give us tremendous insight into how our subscribers are responding to email.
Data syncing and errors - Silverpop does not do a great job of getting data to sync regularly with our CRM (Salesforce.com). The data had to flow back and forth several times before being added to campaigns and in some instances, it took days to update leads! Also, failed lead syncs get stuck in an alert list but it does not notify you otherwise that a lead failed the sync.
Design issues - we use custom HTML to build emails and landing pages, and we were unable to render background images on our campaigns. Also, once you toggle between design and source (code) view to make edits, it often broke the code and threw off the design.
Administrator alerts - when sync fails altogether between systems, there is no email alert sent to the system admin (me/my team) so we at times have found that we have gone 18 hours until we stumble across the fact that the system sync has failed.
Reporting - it is not very comprehensive and we had difficulty generating the level of reporting that we need to have.
Support - there are a few gems in the support team who know what they're doing, but largely calling support is a lesson in frustration.
Product bug fixes - in two instances, my open support tickets were identified as product bugs. One related to incorrect cookie tracking which was causing our leads not to be scoring properly. They determined that this wasn't critical enough to build into their product fix road map. This is core to an automation system working properly.
We found that QlikView can be a bit slow in supporting some forms of encryption. It is web-based and we needed to upgrade all of our server to not support the older SSL and TLS 1 protocols, only support TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. However, QlikView could not run with TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. We had to wait over six months to get a version that would handle the newer TLS versions.
There are so many options with QlikView that you can get lost when developing a visualization. There are still items I have not yet figured out, such as labeling a graph with the name of a selected detail item.
QlikView works by pulling the data it is going to use for visualization into its database. I am a security reviewer and I need to make certain that PII and PHI is not pulled by QlikView for a visualization, otherwise this could become a reportable indecent.
SilverPop is a great marketing tool that integrates with Salesforce to provide customers and employees a great buying and selling experience. The software takes some very difficult tasks and makes them easy to accomplish. With proper setup and management, Silverpop gives you the tools to gain insight into the productiveness of campaigns.
Ease of use, ability to load from pretty much any data source. today I created an application that loaded time sheets from excel that are not in a table format. With Qlik's "enable transformation steps" I was able to automate loads of multiple spreadsheets and multiple tabs easily. Could not do that with any other tool.
This is a little bit difficult to rate because Silverpop is gradually updating its interface to improve usability all around. I know users are able to do their job with minimal assistance. However, some of the interface is dated, and the Programs interface, while functional, has a bit of a learning curve.
QlikView is very easy to implement. The installation is very straight forward. QlikView has several different data connectors that can connect to different data sources very smoothly. The user interface to build the reports is very easy to understand. This helps to have a smaller learning curve. Something very helpful is that QlikView is a browser application for the end users. So, you don't need to install any applications on the user's computer.
While several of the other reviews have mentioned poor performance in this department, we have only had one situation where the system was down (although it was down for several hours). Silverpop segments its clients on different servers, and I know that the problem we experienced only occurred on our specific server (maybe other servers have had their own problems?) but our service has been reliable otherwise.
The Salesforce Integration support team is fantastic. I'd give them greater than a 10 if possible. The rest of the support team can be extremely frustrating to work with. Too often they try to blame something obscure and refuse to escalate or look into the issue. And on occasion when you find system glitches they don't seem to care about fixing them
My experience with the Qlik support team has been somewhat limited, but every interaction I have had with them has been very professional and I received a response quickly. Typically if there is a technical issue, our IT team will follow up. My inquiries are specific to product functionality, and Qlik has been very helpful in clarifying any questions I might have.
My team attended, but I cannot myself rate, but I think it was good as they've successfully launched a training program at our company themselves for users. It was 3-4 day training.
The online trainings are very detailed (for the most part) and really walk through the entire system. They are a little dry, but they are usually broken up into segments to allow you to skip to the parts you need.
Training was as expected. The demo environments tend to be more fully featured that our own environment, but the training was clear and well delivered.
Based on recommendations from Silverpop we made some implementation decisions that we later regretted pretty substantially. In hindsight we should have started a pilot implementation earlier so we could learn and then start over. The big issue for us was that Silverpop recommended a non-keyed database, or at least a database that doesn't use email address as primary key. This is resulted in a large number of duplicate email addresses so that the end user is forced to unsubscribe multiple times to stop receiving emails.
"Implementation" can mean a few things... so I'm not sure that this is the answer you want.... but here it goes: To me, implementation means: "Is the user interface intuitive and can I produce meaningful reports with ease?" On that score, I'd say YES. The amount of training required was minimal and the results were powerful. The desktop implementation is a simple, "blank" interface just waiting for your creativity. The pre-populated templates give you a reasonable start to any project -- and a good set of objects to "play around with" if you're just getting started. Finally, note that the "implementation" I used was baked into QuickBooks 2016 Enterprise -- called "Advanced Reporting"..... That integration makes it ultra useful and simple.
We evaluated alternate providers less than a year into our IBM Watson Campaign contract because the system was so clunky to use (and we wanted a system that would include or better integrate with our SMS provider). Bluecore and Klaviyo were the front runners at the time, and we came close to moving forward with Bluecore. The pricing model and overall the cost of Bluecore was much higher than IBM for us though, and the timing of this was right when the IBM to Acoustic changes took place. We decided to give Acoustic a shot and are optimistic it will be enough to keep us on board once all the dust settles, though I find it unlikely we will renew with Acoustic when our contract is up again. My main email specialist is a Klaviyo expert and finds that platform very easy to use in comparison-- it might be a better fit for a team of our size.
The only other vendor product that I have worked with that provides a similar experience to Qlikview is Tableau. I would recommend Tableau if your use case is to build a fixed dashboard. You can share reports for free without needing to buy additional licenses. I would recommend Qlikview if your users are looking for a more interactive experience. They can create new objects to represent the data which can't be accomplished as easily in Tableau
we have not experienced any currently but moving to lead automation and lead scoring could change that.
i'm not sure how increased employee efficiency would ever be a benefit b/c lead importing and visibility, along with setting up email templates is quite cumbersome.
Generate quick reports for requirements that don't require complex calculations. ROI was fine, but Tableau software was much more intuitive for non-technical users on our team
When putting Qlikview reports side by side with Tableau, we ended up delivering Tableau reports since they were quicker to generate and required no technical expertise
