With Alive5’s Business Class SMS platform, teams can text-enable their office phone lines to send 2-way texts, bulk messages, and manage conversations with customers, patients, clients or patrons with chatbot automation.
$5
per month
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.
It is well suited for communication with existing customers and prospects. It is less appropriate for people just looking to visit our website to get up to date with the latest team news or those who aren't at a computer.
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
Mobile compatibility - AliveChat has a dynamic user interface which makes its popup chat widget display and work perfectly on all devices - mobile and desktop. Thus web visitors get a complete experience no matter the device from which they use in accessing our website.
Analytic - AliveChat provides us with a dynamic set of website analytics that helps us in analyzing our progress or decline in a timely manner. With the analytics provided by AliveChat, we are able to monitor the number of visitors on the website at a particular time, the duration of which they have been on the website, the number of times they have been on the website in time past etc.
Feature packed - AliveChat is packed with features which makes the job of the customer care agents easier. For instance, with AliveChat it is very easy for an agent to transfer a web visitors chat to another agent that has better answers to the agent's query. We are also able to introduce short survey questions to web visitors, which they respond to before they begin chatting with a customer care rep.
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).
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.
AliveChat really serves a different purpose than other products. Very few products offer the ability to chat through our website, so it compliments our phone, text, and email options very well.
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.
AliveChat has made it easy for us to track the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. As the real-time number of visitors on the website gives us insights into the performance of ongoing campaigns.
AliveChat also makes it possible for us to have an idea of where our web visitors are coming from i.e. via the pre-chat survey form for instance. We are able to generate important data like how a web visitor got to know about us, their expectations when visiting our website etc.
AliveChat makes it easy for web visitors to get a real-time response to their questions, with a delay of probably a few seconds.
