Crowdbooster was a tool to measure the success of Twitter and Facebook posts, with visualizations to track retweets, and track potential impressions created, likes, comments, and how many shares a Facebook post has received. Crowdbooster is no longer available.
$9
per month
Zuora
Score8.5 out of 10
N/A
Zuora is one of the best-known subscription billing platforms. Zuora is an enterprise-level product and, as such, provides comprehensive metrics, tax automation, and support for multiple currencies. It also offers Salesforce and NetSuite integration out-of the-box. It often replaces cumbersome ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems that does not focus exclusively on billing.
Before recommending Crowdbooster, I'd want to know what goals they hope to accomplish with the software. Then I would want them to specifically identify what types of metrics would be most useful to their program. If they specifically need to report out on how many people in a certain location they reached, this isn't the right fit. If they are using other tools, there may be duplication. However, if they are currently using more budget-friendly solutions or just getting started with a new program, Crowdbooster is a perfect fit. It will help you to grow your program and is flexible enough to accommodate your needs.
Zuora is great for smaller subscription businesses that have a limited number of simple or basic products. As more products are added to the catalog, the ability to report on specific product performance has become more challenging. Similarly, as our number of customers has grown significantly over the past few years, the extraction of data through export files is more of a challenge to capture all data points.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Timed social media posts - Crowdbooster provides the opportunity to schedule social media posts allowing you to work on other important social media tasks.
Simply beautiful tracking - There are millions of ways to measure social media impact. Crowdbooster offers the most important and relevant measurements in simplified charts..
Great UI - Crappy UI = crappy experience. Crowdbooster's UI is easy to navigate. It won't take months to learn where all the buttons are.
The implementation of Zuora is very helpful. Their interactive training guides are one of the best I've used. It is very thorough and any salesperson can learn how to use it very quickly.
Their subscription management offers many ways to sell a subscription. These subscriptions can be evergreen (renewing every month) or termed subscriptions. The subscriptions can be amended to add/remove products very easily.
The ability to quickly pass through large amounts of usage data for our clients is allowing us to perform billing in a time-effective manner. Once usage data is loaded, a few clicks and all of the invoices for our client base can be generated. Invoices are clean and detailed which help us maintain a good customer experience even with our somewhat complex billing model. The reporting is extremely helpful in calculating the end of month commissions, recognizing and deferring revenue, and overall bookkeeping.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The ranked order of twitter followers and the number of "tweet impressions" did not help that much. Those "tweet impressions" were not really an estimate of how many people were actually reading my tweet. It was simply a sum of followers of the person retweeting a tweet and the sum of all followers from a subsequent retweet of the initial retweet. All this told me was the best case scenario I could expect if ALL followers of a person that retweeted saw my tweet. This is not a true measure of "twitter footprint" – since the “signal to noise” ratio in Twitter is very low.
There was no system in place to track "clicked links" for links embedded in tweets and/or facebook wall posts. Hootsuite did a good job of this – but only for twitter.
The list of recommended times to tweet were always "on the hour" (i.e. 10 a.m, 1 p.m.). Never were the times ever at "half past the hour" etc. An independent study that I did on my own using Google Analytics (and campaign links using google's URL builder) helped me determine that my optimal "Tweet time" during the week is 3:30 p.m. ET. More importantly, the recommended times seemed to be roughly the same on the weekends - which I find strange given that social media behavior does change on the weekends.
Occasionally, in my facebook ranked table of "loyal fans", I would see people in there that had not "liked" or "commented" on a post for months at a stretch and the "look back" period of the table was only around 7 days or so. Hence, I occasionally had to question the accuracy of that table.
User Interface - Zuora's UI is still a weak point, however, this is negated through the use of its API's. Zuora has done a lot of work in releasing new products to limit its UI experience and the addition of Orders allows for more functionality to reduce the UI issue.
Complex system - This is both a pro and a con, but in this instance, it is a con because we may not have taken the time to truly understand the implications of all the options that were available. the Flexibility is great however if you do not take the time to understand the product and what problem you are trying to solve, you can make life difficult for yourself later down the track. Take the time to map out your approach end to end and ensure your assumptions at the start are robust.
Reporting - reporting is weak as such we have moved away to our own reporting data warehouse.
Simple to use and a great value for what it offers. It has a simple but clean interface and it provides fantastic historical data you can use to measure your efforts online. By using a tool like Crowdbooster, you can see what is working with your audience and what isn't. From there, you can start tweaking your strategies
Our business is now, more than ever, focused on our core business rather than homegrown support tools for quoting, contracts, billing, invoicing, payments and the rest of the subscription economy. We evaluated other solutions and found this the best and most viable solution given the strong ties to Salesforce and it's integration. Zuora works, and it works well.
I found it fairly intuitive and easy to use. The information is laid out cleanly, and the most important information appears at a glance on the home page. However, I have worked with other users who had a hard time switching between platforms and identifying where other information was buried. It's not always clear that something is a clickable button! The option to export results is also a bit buried, and not integrated with the date range option.
I had 20+ years of accounting experience before taking on the revenue role. I had several things to [learn] but was able to easily master the software in a matter of weeks. Zuora is our preferred billing platform that we currently use - very efficient and much more automated than our other platform/process.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
There have only been a few days/instances in the past 2.5 years of using zuora that I, personally have had issues or been notified of issues relating to Zuora.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Zuora does a superb job for all the tasks I use it for. Billing - it is trustworthy and accurate. Customer data- it holds it and keeps past records for even cancelled accounts, and subscription builds - it has the ability to make very difficult subscriptions seem easy.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
I do not think it is as supported as it once was when it first arrived on the social media scene. It is an older platform whose main functionality may have already ran its course.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A support request is emailed to their support team, then an automated response is sent to you in a couple hours saying "Hey, someone will take a look at your support request soon". Then somewhere around 12-18 hours later, an actual support member responds with "Have you checked out our tutorials? Here's one that sounds like it might help you". I don't want a tutorial given to me that I've already read through that only exists because of the terrible user design of Zuora's user interface
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
I think Zuora did a great job. However, they could have provided more guidance on how to deal with out Payment Gateway and Processor provider, as well as guidance around providing a Mobile Responsive experience for sites using the Zuora HPM.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
It is a platform that is singularly focused. It does not have a lot of the additions that come stock with other platforms such as robust reporting or deeper insights past schedule times. It is also a stand-alone platform and a lot of its primary functionality can be found in more encompassing platforms.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Zuora provides way more functionality than Recurly or SaaSOptics as a billing engine. However, it is not a general ledger system like NetSuite ERP, it is still designed to be primarily a billing function that feeds into a general ledger via automated general entries. It has simplified our invoice management and automated billing while connecting with Salesforce for high-powered reporting and cross-departmental collaboration. The automation of revenue recognition has the potential to significantly reduce the time spent on accounting close by a few days.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Increased efficiency. I am able to generate useful snapshot reports in seconds. Particularly useful when you need answers fast (such as on a phone call).
Peace of mind. I am able to compare the data in Crowdbooster to what is exported from Facebook and Twitter.
Quicker, simpler evaluation of results. I am able to more easily compare impressions with engagement data to see what is working, and what should change. Particularly useful in day-to-day analysis.
