Birdeye vs. Salesforce Agentforce Sales vs. Yext

For businesses that have customers or clients or patients with several different locations, Birdeye is essential to help with the reviews and messages received through Google and other platforms. For businesses with only 1 single location, Birdeye could still be useful but wouldn't be as essential as it would be for other businesses.

In the end, I think we can always make it fit — and that’s one of the powers of Salesforce. Because of its flexibility and wide range of possibilities, you can really make it work for almost any need. The key, though, is to make thoughtful decisions upfront and plan carefully how you set it up. If you do that, you’ll end up with a truly flexible and effective system.

Incentivized

Yext is great for bigger clients. If your client has a franchise of any kind, or even multiple locations, that's an ideal use case. For smaller clients, with one location that doesn't change a lot, Yext isn't as viable, and the effort to update maybe ten or fifteen listings would be worth it.

Incentivized

• Their customer service is always very helpful and ready to give you the personal attention that you require.
• They connect many different sources and funnel them straight to you so you can easily capitalize on multiple platforms and information streams.
• They are constantly innovating and improving their systems with real-time feedback from their customers.

Incentivized

• It does a good job of routing our leads to customers, to our inside sales reps and teams.
• It does a good job of tracking all of the opportunities that we have, the contacts that we have with people related to the opportunities.
• Organizing and being able to do reports on what our sales are.

Incentivized

• Making sure our location data is correctly being understood by Google.
• Taking into account best design principles for our pages layout.
• Staying on top of Google best practices so we don't have to.
• Building a very robust place for us to store all our location information.
• Solid integrations with some of our other key partners, for example Olo, Punchh.
• Being a very good partner for us, our Client Success Manager is exceptional.

Incentivized

• The sentiment feature is just okay. It requires custom adjustments and time to understand where it is working well and where it is not in order to get the most out of it, while other features require very little user input.
• Social listening needs work. I often receive notifications for unrelated terms because of their similarity in spelling to my organization's name, so I don't use this feature.
• Birdeye could have more built-in features to create digital content from the reviews.
• Birdeye could also have additional reputation tools to strengthen GMB listings and to combat negative press. Review listings and rich snippets in search are great, but having a tool that measures and helps to improve overall brand health/search results would be amazing. My CEO isn’t looking at what is going right. He looks at what is going wrong. We may have thousands of positive reviews on Google, but the bad article with false information is still showing up on page one of search results. That makes for an unhappy CEO.

Incentivized

• I’d say the only thing that can be a bit tricky — and I know Tableau helps address this — is that sometimes we’re limited in how deep we can go with the data in terms of reporting. It would be great to have a bit more robustness within the app itself. However, we’ve figured out our workarounds, and overall, I think it’s a fantastic product — which is why I’ve been working with it for 23 years.

Incentivized

• Cost. This platform offers a lot of powerful features, but it has an expensive barrier to entry.
• Annual contracts limit flexibility for smaller companies
• The biggest drawback is that you need to keep your subscription active or listings/citation data will revert back to what it was pre-Yext implementation

Incentivized

I think it is a good tool overall, there are some hiccups but what program doesn't have them. I think we should be notified of more things, specifically broken integrations. There have been instances where I don't notice for MONTHS a client it's having requests sent out because they are organically still getting reviews.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

The easiest program I've ever used in the medical field. Just one click to send a review and easy data entry to add customer into the system. The Birdeye program is actually fun to use and no prior skill is necessary!

Incentivized

All in all, it's a great product that use all day, every day. It's aesthetically pleasing overall and specifically provides information in a clean, concise way. It's easy to manipulate and seems to play well with the other products I use such as Pardot, Gmelius, and our company's proprietary data system. It increases my efficieny in my admin tasks so I have more time to focus on revenue-generation and account management. It's also easy to use from everywhere where it be on a university campus, in a hotel room, one of a million Starbucks, or at home

Incentivized

Yext is pretty easy and straightforward to utilize out of the box. While I work for a digital marketing agency, and this is second nature to me at this point, I do believe the average SMB owner with zero digital marketing experience could be a proficient Yext user within 1 hour or so of usage. It's easy

Incentivized

All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:

Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:

Live and historical data on system performance
Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance
Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats
Best security practices for your organization
Information on how we safeguard your data

For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon

The customer support is usually very fast in getting someone connected with you to figure out a solution. Sometimes the communication following up on how they did can be a little much, but they are just practicing what they preach and doing what they know best. People are usually very friendly and knowledgable also.

Incentivized

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

We are a larger company with 26 locations, so we may receive additional attention. But they are always quick to answer our calls or emails. I rarely need support as the software delivers as promised. I will say their staff thus far has been very knowledgable about Yext and some lesser-known features. For us, they really understand our needs and why I'd be asking for certain solutions.

Incentivized

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Let Birdeye do what they do

Incentivized

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

Our choice of reputation management platform came down to two contenders, Birdeye and Listen360. Ultimately we chose Birdeye because of their ethical review gathering process. Listen360 had review-gating built in as part of their process, which is against Google's terms of service. We wanted to be very careful to gather reviews in an ethical way, and Birdeye was better for our needs.

Incentivized

Based on my experience, I’ve used Odoo — it’s an open-source ERP system. It’s not exactly the same as Salesforce or Sales Cloud, but it serves a similar purpose. And I feel that Sales Cloud is better. Personally, I find it easier to use and better than what Odoo offers, especially in terms of customization and achieving business objectives. That’s where Salesforce Sales Cloud really stands out in comparison to Odoo.

Incentivized

Before Yext, I used Moz Local to manage our business listings. Moz Local had fewer listing platforms included with their service. For example, Moz Local did not include Yahoo, and we had issues with inconsistent Yahoo listings. We ultimately switched to Yext and it's been a good fit for us.

Incentivized

It's very scalable as it has a ton of features (but you do need an admin who understands how to leverage these features). Because of the various features, we've also needed to host onboarding sessions with our users so that they can familiarize themselves with the platform, which isn't always super user-friendly or intuitive.

Incentivized

• One stop shop for Reviews are great, it saves marketing department time and money on if they were all separate.
• I'm not sure about the surveys yet due to integration.
• Listings is very easy to use with updating this saved us money compared to competitors.

• It helps us achieve our objectives, especially now with Agentforce — we can get more insights to help our sellers sell more. It’s really nice because it’s almost like you can use the standard part of Salesforce to train your agents and teach your sellers how to improve their sales. So that’s really nice.

Incentivized

• Yext has absolutely strengthened our SEO performance and has driven leads that perform extremely well.
• Yext has improved our consultation show rate because all of the clinic information for each of our locations is accurate no matter which website our clients are using to search for the clinic info.
• Yext has allowed our organization to ensure the correct phone numbers are listed across the web, which increased the number of inbound leads that come into our Call Center.

Incentivized