Birdeye vs. Zen Planner

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.

I have used Zen Planner at 3 different Jujitsu schools. Every school that has used it, has had great success in keeping their attendance records straight for their students. This is great when promotions are coming up, or special seminars that need to reach everyone. I don't know that Zen Planner is a great product for places that don't need to communicate with their clients on a regular basis.

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

• Easy to use interface
• Payment processing is easy for classes or for a small retail shop.
• The free integrated mobile website is great for everyone to check out the calendar and even sign and pay from within it.
• I can also send emails right from the platform when I need to connect with a student.

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

• The only thing I would like to see, is the ability to see my entire attendance from the app. I can view it on the desktop though.

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

No questions about that, I'm with Zen Planner for a while! They have everything I need and more.

Incentivized

I think it is very easy to figure out very quickly by just playing around in the dashboard. If you have a question you can reach out to our contacts and they do a very good job of figuring out if or what is the problem and getting back to us fast.

Support is really responsive for the most part. I don't feel like they explain it the best for people who aren't as tech-savvy. I have recently had trouble with a more difficult integration and it is hard to pinpoint who I need to reach out to.

Incentivized

Let Birdeye do what they do

Incentivized

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

I have not used any product that are similar to Zen Planner in any way.

Incentivized

• SEO has increased due to online rep increasing
• Review count has come up significantly due to having a platform that helps
• The system puts reviews and where they are coming from into perspective to try and obtain more in other ways

Incentivized

• Saves me time in using a paper attendance record sheet.
• Payments are automated, no need to request checks or payments from anyone. Emails are sent out if a payment fails.
• I can keep track of 10, 20, 30, or even 50 students using this platform.

Incentivized