GroupTweet (discontinued) vs. Verint Channel Automation

GroupTweet will work well for any brand that needs to extend their message through advocates authorized by GroupTweet. Our media company, The Breaking News Network, is the largest hyperlocal media network devoted to social good, and unique in providing a way for any community newsmaker to get their word out through our city feeds. Over 4,000 Twitter feeds - for example, city politicians, civic groups, nonprofits and performing arts organizations - are authorized to share content on our 400 city feeds.

From experience, you may ask the Conversocial team to make recommendations on licenses for larger vs. smaller social customer service teams. The need for support and the amount of usage you may get from the tool's robust offering may differ as a result of those precedents. The tool is adaptable in both scenarios it would seem.

• Since Twitter is a vehicle for breaking news, our correspondents in each of our 400 cities uses a simple hashtag to syndicate their local news and events. It is simple to use and correspondents don't have to do anything differently to share their messages across our city feeds.
• We can mobilize our correspondents to collectively promote news and events that impact the public good. For example, we can develop advocate networks to support initiatives like crowdfunding campaigns

• Previous conversations: This is one of the main reasons why I personally love Conversocial over Hootsuite and other social media engagement tools. Conversocial pulls in all previous interactions we've had with community members and it helps us identify if we've already addressed their problem, if they are a detractor/advocate, and so much more. With other engagement tools, it's frustrating as a community member may repost the same thing over and over again, but at different time periods. If you're unable to see what someone has said in the past, we may waste our time replying to the same thing multiple times, or we also risk responding with the same general advice, when we could try a different approach.
• Tags and filters: Conversocials use of tags and filters are extremely simple to use. They have shortcuts which help you easily assign a tag to an item and then you can easily pull up each of those tags within Conversocial itself or your can open up an external report. If my team is in a hurry and wants to quickly see a certain tag, we can use the filter option and within seconds we have all the information we need.
• Simple shortcuts: Conversocial has several shortcuts that save my team a lot of time. One single button on my keyboard can apply sentiment and archive something so it's out of my way. I can also use shortcuts to apply a tag, assign an item, and do other tasks. It may seem like a small benefit but each second saved really adds up throughout each day and week.
• Communication: As we know, technology has issues and every tech issue Conversocial has experiences has been handled extremely well. I've never encountered any issues contacting Conversocial, we're always notified when they are working on a solution and once the problem has been fixed. We also receive random pop-ups within Conversocial to notify us of known issues before our team experiences them, and when there is a new feature that we should be aware of. Their communication is always on point and it's great to know that we can always rely on them.

Incentivized

• GroupTweet would be awesome if the service for collaboratively distributing info extended to Facebook, G+ and other social networks. However, that's probably something out of their control to develop.

• I would like to see an improvement in the reporting dashboard which is something I mentioned to Josh (the CEO) on a call back in April. He said that it is something they are working on but to remember that this is truly a customer service social media platform so some of the features that I would like to see may not fit well with the users of the product.

Incentivized

GroupTweet is simply the best way to syndicate messages across Twitter. It takes time to build the foundation of authorized users, but once the user base understood the power we provided to get their message out, it has become institutionally utilized.

The only two reasons we would not continue using Conversocial are it's lack of comprehensive analytics and its lack of Radian6's categorization tools. Tags make up for the categorization pretty well, however, and we're considering switching everything over to this now that we've tested tags for a couple months within Conversocial. (I previously wrote that Conversocial lacks support for some social channels like Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, but they have now added Instagram and YouTube.)

Because of the number of features it offers and the manner in which they're presented. I've explored a number of other tools that just don't do it as well. When sorting through and responding to hundreds of social media messages each day, the number of clicks it takes to do something really matters. Conversocial does a great job of minimizing clicks and presenting the data we need without having to click to find it

Downtime is very rare, and the occasional occurrences are typically a problem with Twitter or FB API.

Extremely fast, practically in real time.

Our account rep at Conversocial has set up a call with me every two weeks to check in, talk about new features, or answer questions. I know I can email or call her for help anytime. Their support team also responds quickly.

Comprehensive training in all aspects of the software and general usages (including social media) for both agents and managers. Simulation workshops really made the live deployment process very smooth.

Outstanding & comprehensive training both on-line and instructor-led. Another crucial differentiator from competitors in our eyes.

Without any tech requirement on our end, this was an extraordinarily easy implementation to run, compared to other platforms like live chat or email.

There is no other product like GroupTweet! It is simple and takes no extra resources to use it, just add a hashtag. We are unusual in that we use GroupTweet for over 400 Twitter accounts. It would also work well for single accounts with a number of collaborative users.

Early on we did comparisons with Hootsuite and later with Adobe. While they have similarities, the difference at the time and likely currently, was the personal interest and general accessibility of Conversocial's platform and people. The combination of an effective CRM solution and a team that was readily available to help proved to be the winning formula for our business.

• Since The Breaking News Network is noncommercial, we use GroupTweet to extend our facility to support the community by functioning as Twitter based bulletin boards. By offering a free and valuable service to the community instead of a pushy sales person trying to sell advertising, we create a lot of good will.
• In the future, we will use GroupTweet to get advocate networks to support crowdfunding initiatives we bring forward with our new crowdfunding marketing company, BNN Funding. For more information on how we develop massive advocate networks, BNNFunding.com

• One of the biggest benefits we are seeing is that we have reduced the number of post-holiday complaints coming into head office. Since we are responding to issues and concerns as they arise, we can impact overall customer satisfaction.
• The efficiencies gained from using a centralized platform for managing the response process has enabled us to reduce our team by 50%.
• We can track that we are responding to a fan's first message within 30 minutes.
• We can track the number of messages each user engages with.
• We can see the most effective times of day to post and reply.