Acquire.io vs. Sparkcentral, by Hootsuite

Our company uses Acquire's co-browse and chat functionality to assist customers with technical issues with our website, help clarify what to enter into our online loan applications, and provide service through website and mobile chat. It is very effective for these use cases.

Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential

• Acquire is easy to implement and integrate with websites.
• Very responsive to new development requests and support.
• Acquire is esy to use for both the customer and service agent.

• The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
• The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
• Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).

• The product is stand-alone chat and co-browse, not really omni-channel.
• Workforce management features, work distribution and control, could use some improvement.

• In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
• Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
• The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.

Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.

The system meets all my expectations.

They are very responsive to inquiries, and quickly make product changes when asked.

Incredible customer service team that replies back very quickly, follows up on the reported issue till it's resolved in a very timely manner.

We looked at ZenDesk, Genesys, and other products. We selected Acquire because their online demo is pretty amazing, they are easy to integrate/implement, and were very responsive during initial conversations.

Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.

• Acquire gave us chat as a service channel.
• It gave us insight and details on long-standing, but hard to prove, website concerns.

• Customers appreciate fast responses to the things they post on social media. This tool allows that to happen.
• The dashboard allows us to keep up with how many are waiting in our queue so we can keep up with how busy we are during the day and manage it.
• Customer satisfaction has seemed to increase while using this tool.
• Being able to add notes with the customers address and phone info is awesome as well.