ClickDimensions is an email marketing and marketing automation platform for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Features include email marketing, web tracking, lead scoring, social discovery, campaign tracking, and form capture.
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Higher Logic Thrive
Score 7.1 out of 10
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Higher Logic Thrive is a private community platform that empowers members, customers, support and product teams to create and manage meaningful, engaging online communities. The solution is designed to keep users coming back. They can find support, best practices, peer-to-peer connections, resources, events, and networking, all in one destination.
ClickDimensions is great for SMB companies looking for an easy to use, robust platform especially in situations where there are only a few people within the Marketing Department.
Higher Logic works very well for our business purposes. We can very easily create new communities when we need to (and this is often!). Our association isn't as concerned with driving engagement, but the tools Higher Logic provides allows us to take a closer look at the engagement level of our committee members when needed
The nurture campaign builder was great. Easy to use and to follow along with.
The drop and drag editor was easy to use and you could start using it with no training.
I always like when a service offers a certification for their product. ClickDimensions training was easy to follow, gave good content/tips/tricks and really helped me learn the platform.
Higher Logic product managers are probably some of the best in the industry. They know their products and aren't pushy in trying to sell them to you. Don't get me wrong, they do try to sell you a product, but they understand that not everyone who is tasked with learning more is also a decision maker. That doesn't stop them from being professional and thorough in their demonstrations or explanation of fees.
Their technical support is top notch. Not only do they work to resolve issues, they also work with you to help you with non-issues. Our initial redesign was done by an agency that worked with HL directly to set up the new site. When I was tasked with a mini-redesign this year, HL technical support offered me a lot of insight on how to best do this using just my skills and HL.
They offer training on their platforms to ensure your success as an administrator. There is no cost and you can either go to their onsite two days "boot camp" or you can access a plethora of training videos and webinars through their online users' community.
Reporting is copious but you cannot build your own reports so you may have lots of information in several different reports and have to pick and choose across several to combine manually. Exporting functionality is there but there are some reports that are only a screen shot and you cannot export them.
I see no reason for us to deprecate use at this point. It is important for us as a business to maintain our partnership with them and keep on the pulse of leading technology. ClickDimensions is a marketplace leader for the world of marketing automation, and in coordination with CRM, it's all the more relevant.
They are a great company that offer great products - primarily their community. As they continue to grow and expand their offerings, I believe they will increase the number of products that offer and in turn grow their client base. We use their community, activity synch, and volunteer manager currently.
I want to stay neutral. It's not that this product doesn't have appealing features or capabilities, it's that they aren't consistent and stable. So you lose data or your data is not accurate. Or some connection fails and the workflow doesn't trigger as it is supposed to, or the visits or clicks or other metrics contain bad data one month, then the next they're back to normal. This company needs to focus on getting their core product right and not on new features.
The software is not that simple to use when you have to get volunteers involved in the content assembly process. The content management system that is native to Higher Logic could improve to make the task of training volunteers far easier. Given its simplicity, it is hard for the system to rival more developed websites that use advanced CMS software.
You submit a ticket and they will always come back asking for more information. So the next time you try to be proactive and add that information to the original ticket, but then they come back and ask for something else. It gets to the point where you have to believe it is a stall tactic. You ask for more detail into their processes and you get the runaround. 9 times out of ten they will point the finger at Dynamics 365 as the culprit. It is like pulling teeth to get to Tier 2 support and then the questions start all over again, even if you send screenshots.
Higher Logic's support is sub-par at best. It can be difficult to get in contact with anyone from the support team, and when you do, it seems as if they don't want to talk to you and don't even have the answers to your questions. Within the past few months, we've contacted them twice and both times have been very disappointing. The first time was to let them know there was an inconsistency between the analytics report and the heat map. They basically said that they already knew about the problem but didn't have any set plans to fix it because they were working on other "more important" things. The second time was for a conference call to go over some additional features that we wanted to implement. And the lady we spoke with seemed very disgusted to have to speak with us and then rushed us off the phone because she had another call.
Clickdimensions is severely impeded by its integration into Dynamics CRM. Consequently it lacks the Intuitiveness of HubSpot, and the straightforward usability of MailChimp. It is a perfect system if you want to exist entirely within Dynamics, but it requires a high degree of expertise in Dynamics to get maximum value out of it. We're currently migrating to HubSpot, and while the initial integration is proving challenging, I already sense we will be able to deliver a lot more of our marketing goals much more easily, and see an ROI.
We are just in the early stages of looking into HubSpot Service Hub to determine if it will be a viable replacement for Higher Logic Community. We have other uses for the ServiceHub so there is an appeal to have it be a "one stop shop" for us. The big question however is how it will stack up to Higher Logic for the online communities. Candidly, while Higher Logic may be tough to beat in this area, it is something we will be looking closely at in the next 12 months.
