Atlassian Stride (discontinued) vs. Sparkcentral (discontinued)

Stride works well for those looking for just a communication tool. However, there are a lot of similar programs out there that offer more interesting features without being overwhelming. The simplicity works for and against Stride. Smaller groups would find Stride useful, especially if they are not concerned with the public rooms

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Stride is great as a chat tool with your team members online.
• Stride allows us to share documents and files with one another.

Incentivized

• 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).

• Dark theme would be nice
• Better integrations to 1 on 1 chats, some software only works in group/room chat
• Platform is going away in a few months, so letting it run longer would be nice.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Stride falls short in almost every regard. While Stride is affordable, Slack and Ryver offer vital integrations that increase efficiency and are more enjoyable for employees to use. The features of Slack and Ryver that add personalization of chat (private vs. public) also add a layer of efficiency and flexibility that are hard to pass up for the simplicity and affordability of Stride.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Stride helps with keeping your email inbox cleaner and more organized. More conversational messages can be done through Stride leaving our emails less cluttered and finding emails easier.
• Stride assists with keeping a record of all your past conversations with all team members. Referring to previous communications help us keep track of current statuses of projects.
• Stride helps us keep track of documents we've shared in the past with the team and retrieve them if we need to refer back to them later.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized