Likelihood to Recommend ChatBeacon is a decent choice for on-premises chat support, but the clunky agent UI sparks no joy. If your organization can use a cloud-based solution, there are plenty of other fish in the sea
Read full review Salesforce Experience Cloud is well-suited for organizations that have clients who periodically or routinely need to access historical data or documents. The product also offers an exceptionally effective tool to engage with customers around support/service issues and the entire Case management functionality built into the Salesforce platform. The product might be less well-suited in environments where there is exceptionally high staff turnover within customer accounts, or where there is a substantial lack of very basic computer skills.
Read full review Pros Easy to install and configure. Easy for customers to use. Read full review Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required Read full review Cons ChatBeacon is just SightMax with a fresh coat of paint. The entire agent UI is remarkably worse than SightMax. Read full review The documentation for implementing Experience Cloud can be a bit confusing as their rebranding hasn't made it's way into all articles, resulting in different terminology being used to refer to the same thing Some things are not as intuitive regarding their customizability, so there's a bit of a learning curve (i.e. Lightning apps can't be used to customize layouts in Experience Cloud) Read full review Usability Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other
Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend
Salesforce Trailhead along with it
Read full review Performance It's delivered on our original requirements and we've found ways to grow its usage. We continue to build on our original success and we can report our data out to leadership to show a true return on investment which is great for growing support and expanding uses for the system.
Read full review Support Rating Support is a strong point for ChatBeacon - their support team is small, but you definitely get white-glove service. Zero complaints about ChatBeacon support!
Read full review We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Before using SightMax (now ChatBeacon), we used
AliveChat , which was an OK SaaS product, but the team operating the service would frequently restart the servers after maintenance and forget to start our instance back up. ChatBeacon(SightMax) as on-prem software eliminated this concern. We've been evaluating ChatBeacon vs. other products lately, and we really like how DeskPro stacks up vs. ChatBeacon - ChatBeacon is purely a chat product, and DeskPro does web chat/phone/email ticketing.
Read full review I have used Datatel/Colleague/Recruiter before. There were issues because only one person at the institution was able to have the student's record open at a time. This was problematic when collaboration between departments was necessary especially in the case of admissions, financial aid, and registration. We also had to do our work and then log out before asking a questions of another department. Sometimes simultaneous use was necessary. However, this was years ago and they may have since updated the program.
Read full review Return on Investment Using website chat (often with an agent:customer ratio of up to 1:3 or more ) vs. phone support (with an agent ratio of 1:1) has greatly reduced support costs in every business unit. Providing realtime feedback and links (vs. phone calls) has greatly improved the turnaround on the sales and customer inquiry processes. Read full review Improved online admission application completion rates from mid-60%s to mid-80%s. Positive user experience from start-to-finish to leverage one data system for all prospective student data Fewer data integrations transforming and loading sensitive student data by leveraging Salesforce Community Cloud to access already existing data Read full review ScreenShots