Alida CXM vs. ShipperHQ

From my experience, I believe that Vision Critical offers the best software to manage an insights community. They are great to work with, and my opinion has only improved over time. However, that doesn't mean it is the best survey software overall. If someone simply needs to program and distribute surveys, this may or may not be the right solution. There are some other really great survey tools on the market that are competitively priced and offer very intuitive interfaces (like Qualtrics). If you are going to recruit people to answer surveys or provide feedback on an ongoing basis (re-contacting and engaging with the same people repeatedly), though, Vision Critical would be my #1 recommendation.

ShipperHQ is almost too heavy-handed for our use case. We are only a single-origin shipper so we don't need the advanced functionality of multi-origin or drop-shipping. It is suited much better for organizations that have multiple origins or that use drop-ship facilities, or even a company managing multiple different eCommerce websites. We opted to go with it because of its great reviews, combined with less than stellar reviews of the competition.

Incentivized

• The team is helpful in creating complicated survey logic
• The team is accommodating in creating interfaces that suit our desired look
• The team keeps in regular contact in order to effectively manage our requests and goals

• It is easy to batch process orders.
• It quickly calculates rates to compare.
• It is easy to keep track of orders for future review.

Incentivized

• The functionality when creating a new questionnaire is rather clunky, particularly when there are a few conditional factors in the logical flow; being able to see those factors and how they apply with some sort of other logical layout would really help when creating a longer survey.
• There are quite a few steps that aren't intuitive when launching a survey, for instance all the various dates (launch date, reserve date, survey date, etc etc etc). If there were a description field if you hovered above labeled areas of sections that explained what this field was for that would really help
• It doesn't help either that the entire site is grey; it's a cold environment to be in for a long time, and the simple design makes it seem more clunky than it probably really is.

• The user interface is a little tricky. It is not as easy to navigate as other shipping apps.
• I wish that ShipperHQ had the functionality to print shipping labels and manage shipments. We currently have to use a different third-party app for shipment management.
• I would also like to see the option for adding shipping rules if shipping management was integrated.

Incentivized

Vision Critical often requires you to dump the data to a statistical program. I hate that step. You waste time, and improve the chance of data being lost, or changed.

I give ShipperHQ a 10/10 because the software does exactly what it says, and has a rock-solid support team to help get everything set up. The features are pretty easy to use and implement.

Incentivized

I think there is a ton of room to improve, in things as simple as aesthetics and other areas of logical flow when it comes to creating and then launching a survey, as well as providing descriptors for what each field is referencing. For instance, there are like 5 date fields to be filled out, but no button near them that says "this date will determine _________" and I am not about to go back into the training module, which was confusing enough to FIND, let alone work through to find just ONE answer.

I'm not giving a 10/10 because I did need a little hand-holding to get through the initial setup. Overall, it's not that difficult to use once you understand how to apply custom dimensional rules.

Incentivized

Absolutely fantastic support team. Willing to help you online through vast collection of how-to guides and resources, online via chatbox, or over the phone. Even though we were in different time zones, they were always available. Very helpful and knowledgeable

Their support is the primary reason I elected to purchase a premium. They helped a lot with the initial set up.

Incentivized

Vision Critical is more appealing visually but no where near as complex or robust. Vision Critical is also much more expensive though.

USPS only allows you to use their services (obviously). It was sluggish and often offline. The shipsaver insurance saves us money. We had to guess shipping costs for items instead of entering their weights and sizes ahead of time. It integrates with our e-commerce site. Glad we have it now.

Incentivized

• Our use of Vision Critical's software has allowed us to dramatically increase the amount of research that we do, at a much lower cost. Since there is no incremental cost for each survey we field, we can ask many questions we wouldn't have been able to otherwise.
• Our use of an insights community has also sped up the research process, allowing us to write, program, field and report on a survey within only a few days.
• Because of the two advantages listed above, we have been able to listen closer to our customers' opinions.

• ShipperHQ is reliable and requires little to no maintenance, which for a small crew like ours is invaluable.
• ShipperHQ also offers the option to display either retail shipping rates or our discounted rates to our customers. This is handy because we can display those discounted rates, which results in higher conversion and fewer abandoned carts due to high shipping costs.
• One negative, however, is that since ShipperHQ lacks the ability to manage shipments, we have had to use another third party app which increases overhead.

Incentivized