Adobe Journey Optimizer is a customer engagement solution, enabling brands to orchestrate and deliver personalized customer engagement across all channels — including email, web, app, mobile, and more — in the moments that matter to customers.
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Kustomer
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform built for managing high support volume by optimizing experiences throughout the customer service journey. Kustomer was acquired by Facebook in late 2020, but spun out in 2023 and re-launched as an independent entity, Kustomer, LLC.
$89
per month per user
Pricing
Adobe Journey Optimizer
Kustomer
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Enterprise
$89
per month, per user
Ultimate
$139
per month, per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Journey Optimizer
Kustomer
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
All plans require an annual subscription and 8 users minimum.
AJO is best suited for advanced Martech teams who are already bought into the Adobe ecosystem through the use of RTCDP, AA, AAM, etc. Organizations that are starting their Martech journey are good candidates, as well as those who are reevaluating all of their marketing channel vendors near the same time. Success in AJO is highly dependent on the number of marketing channels added. Close coordination with database teams is essential for success. Many of the offline data requirements benefit from modeling of the data. Having dedicated resources developing AJO (RTCDP)-specific views will reduce the amount of QA required to bring the solutions to market
I would say the greatest strength of Kustomer is its flexibility. In the hands of a skilled admin, it can be adapted to tons and tons of different use cases. I've been able to make custom displays for different groups of agents, produce complex cross sections of users, draw interesting data relationships combining marketing contacts and customer-initiated contacts. For example, there's really no other data source in our company which could tell you which users received a specific promo code and checked out with it, received their delivery within 14 days and then can related that to the number of times they contacted us about using our product. At the intersection of communication, marketing, data, and relationship-management, Kustomer shines at the center. I would say it falls short when you are trying to coordinate multiple "side conversations" with multiple sources to resolve an issue. This is a tough task for any type of platform, but if you're maintaining 3 different email chains with a 3PL partner, the customer, and a separate internal conversation, it would be confusing anyway!
All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.
For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.
It has been working very well, and actually it is a reliable tool for audience segmentation and everything that needs to be done for a campaign to deploy correctly
At times, Adobe Journey Optimizer offers too many options, making things less user-friendly than I would personally prefer. As mentioned earlier, there is a tendency to encounter decision paralysis with the increase in available options. While having options is excellent, in typical Adobe fashion, too many can be overwhelming for users
There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.
Sometimes when the manager connects to a support representative, even though the response is very immediate, they are not always able to provide a solution and we end up resolving the issue other ways
I did not reach out to Kustomer support when we had an issue. Still, whenever we provide feedback to our manager regarding what can improve based on our experience using Kustomer, our manager always comments that Kustomer support always replies with some positive feedback based on our suggestions.
The only thing I wanted to mention is that when going into the email edition, when adding labels, I was able to copy and paste the labels before, and now it has changed and I am no longer able to do it without editing the label itself
They both have their pros and cons, I feel it depends on the users that the products are targetting, SFMC is has more specialized customizations, Adobe does offer similar but require a higher technical knowledge which is not something that is provided bt the other product
Apps like Intercom, Zendesk, and Gorgios all treat customer inquiries as tickets, just tracking that one issue or interaction with a customer. Kustomer treats each customer as an individual, which allows us to provide top-notch customer service. Customers love that we're able to be more conversational and informal, while still solving their issues quickly. It also helps us build relationships with customers and increases repeat orders.
Multichannel onboarding journey improving the engagement of freshmen in the business, resulting in a decrease in the dropout rate.
Separate business of anticipation of receivables from suppliers that used to be manual and now I have connected this entire operation via the S3 connector, less manual work and significant gains in conversions and payments
We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.
