Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and is now part of Adobe Experience Manager. Later versions of AEM include features of Livefyre pre-installed. Livefyre (or the Livefyre Studio app) is a content curation, social media UGC, audience engagement application that enables users to access user generated content that can be streamed in real-time to a customer’s sites, digital billboards, apps,…
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PowerReviews
Score 8.0 out of 10
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PowerReviews helps companies gather ratings and reviews from customers, build Q&A content, syndicate reviews across retailers and search engines, and measure results from these endeavors. The company also offers managed services to help businesses improve customer engagement. The company was founded in 2005 and is based in Chicago.
I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.
Any site with e-commerce should have reviews if possible, to give users the confidence necessary to click "add to cart." PowerReviews is easy to implement and has highly customizable display possibilities. I would recommend them to a mid to large enterprise looking for a scalable solution. Small businesses might be able to use a more stripped down tool.
PowerReviews does a good job at flagging responses so there isn't anything inappropriate on our website.
PowerReviews provides a nice "snapshot" of reviews with an average rating, recommendation percentage, and the main pros and cons. Making it quick and easy for the customer to get overall information.
It is easy for customers to leave reviews. There is a good amount of open-ended questions as well as options that customers can choose from. The system is customizable to fit our needs.
Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.
We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.
We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.
My experience was with simple software like Google My Business, but for some Reviews & Ratings, it was good enough and supplied my demand. Once the Google world is one of the bests environments for initial and small businesses, I think using their tools someway we can sound better. If it's not the case PowerReviews will serve as well.
Custom components and PowerReviews API can display positive customer feedback from an element.
In return for honest reviews and answers to customer questions, we provide genuine and authentic feedback and let customers strain new products.
Syndicated reviews help customers see how products work in real life, which increases trust in our website/business and the products and boosts conversions.
