Brand Embassy (discontinued) vs. Sprout Social

Though the strengths I listed in the prior question are really hopeful, the negatives outweigh the positives so much that at this time I could not in good conscience recommend this product. I really hope those issues improve - if they do, this would be a really strong tool for a customer service-based company like ours. Particularly one with so many people working remotely. For now, I'm honestly thankful I was able to take a different position here in which I never plan to touch NICE again.

Incentivized

IMO it's best for an organization that has a lot of different people working on social media. They could be in different departments or just different members of the same team responsible for different types of posts (corporate, e-commerce, branding, etc.). I don't think it's as vital for a one-person team working solely within the Meta platform, for instance, especially if they're less concerned with detailed analytics.

Incentivized

• Easy to understand and use interface with detailed perks for responding, evaluating and tracking user feedback.
• Excellent and easy to generate reports with lots of relevant data for day-to-day operations.
• Agent performance and team management.
• Easily measurable KPIs thanks to detailed reporting.
• Use of tags and sentiment help make analysis of customer behavior easier.

• For each account, customize posts for each platform, and schedule them to go live simultaneously.
• Employee Advocacy via Sprout Social has integrated AI assistance for captions. Usually I would generate one suggested caption for employees to use/stem from when re-sharing to their socials. But now, EA message ideas display in random orders to better promote the full range of content.
• Sprout Social has made the option to gamify the sharing concept quite easily with Employee Advocacy. Using the Leaderboard feature, employees can earn points in Employee Advocacy. Customized point values ensure you know how to climb the Leaderboard and start some friendly competition.

Incentivized

• In terms of reports that we get from Brand Embassy, it would be great to have information about the number of cases, or conversations that we have with our customers. At the moment, we have just info about number of interactions and the total workload.
• There are options to tag every conversation, in order to track why our customers contact us. Their tag menu is a bit too small, it would be great if it was larger.

• Social media platforms don't always play nice with Sprout so it will always be a challenge to get all integrations to work properly.
• Sprout Social is a growing organization and they are acquiring new technologies, which can be good. However, they often spend time in meetings upselling new services. I like to learn about enhancements and opportunities but prefer to focus on my investments first.

Incentivized

I still use the platform: - its use is customer friendly - improves and speed up customer care on SM - improves speed and quality of internal processes/communication - monitor/measure all valuable metrics

I like Sprout for our needs and I like that it is easy to use. We want something better than HootSuite but don't need a high-level fancy program. The only think I don't like is customer service (except for chat).

Incentivized

Please see all other details from previous answers in this survey.

Incentivized

Sprout Social's ease of use and navigation throughout the technology are relatively easy to figure out and teach. We also had a representative thoroughly walk us through the features and functionality to set us up for success in using the platform. I didn’t give it a ten because there were times when the navigation didn’t make sense, but once you figured out the quirks, it didn’t cause any trouble.

Incentivized

Uptime was OK, but given the fact that we are in Europe, there were some specific problems: They tended to take the system down for maintenance during the night in the US, which was during our workday. This was definitely problematic and hard to explain to our clients.

It is quick to post, however you have to refresh the page every time you add a new scheduled item.

It is difficult to describe just how awesome the support guys and gals at Brand Embassy are. Ever-present and eager to help, with kind and helpful attitude and you can really feel they are doing this to help you make results

Sprout Social's customer support is extremely responsive. They're also always looking for suggestions on how they can make the product better and will actually take your ideas to their team to see if they're worth implementing. I've never had an issue that couldn't be resolved by them in a timely manner.

Incentivized

Their training is good, but the promotion of it is even better. I don't need or have the time for training, but I was always happy to know it was there. They did a great job sending updates out and making me aware when there was a new feature that I may want training for. As for the training I never used it, so I can't comment on that

Make sure you do it all the way. Do not break it into phases. Pour yourself a coffee, start it in the morning and you'll be done before you finish that coffee.

Generally I don't see huge differences between social CRM tools - it's mainly in the details of how well it's implemented and connected to your channels. For example other tools cannot easily process non-standard channels like custom made forums or have a e-mail based ticketing for private follow ups. Brand Embassy shines in this area.

We are constantly exploring our options and looking for the most cutting-edge products that suit our needs as a business. Sprout ticked the boxes for what we needed when it was time for a change. Both are powerful tools, and you can only see by doing.

Incentivized

• The first year when we started to focus on social care, we received 736 mentions. 4 years later we are dealing with 725, 942 mentions per year without the necessity to hire more people into our social care team. The seven of them are still able to respond to our customers very quickly and with high quality. And we believe that Brand Embassy is the key to our success in social care. Thanks to this tool we can simply manage such a big amount of mentions and questions.

• One positive impact has been a huge time saver for our team. Where we once had multiple systems and delays from producing content to approval to publishing, now everything is seamless.
• Another positive impact is streamlining the onboarding process for new team members. Sprout Social is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to study even for someone completely new to social media.
• One negative impact has been the time it takes to wade through irrelevant social listening posts. The filtering is not effective enough to eliminate the noise.

Incentivized