Dryfta is and event
platform that is comprised of a free suite of applications that are designed to
collect event data and measure event ROI, sell tickets, build event websites,
launch mobile apps, engage and network attendees, retrieve and manage leads for
exhibitors with a unified CRM, segment attendees and create email campaigns,
create shareable real-time custom reports and more.
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Xola
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Xola, headquartered in San Francisco, provides cloud-based software designed to make it simple for businesses to manage reservations in real time from any channel—bookings made in-person, over the phone, through their company website, on Xola’s vendor mobile app, with local resellers, and online travel agents that are integrated with Xola.
I can't provide a scenario where Dryfta could be well suited. I guess it's a matter of delivering what has been promised on time, and without having to invest thousands of hours in extra work, as it was in our case. If it worked properly it could be a good tool for any conference.
Xola is suited for small, medium, and large businesses that handle internet bookings, direct telephone bookings, and concierge/affiliate bookings. It tracks scheduling, payments, affiliate billing, can message customers through SMS or email, can hold notes on clients as any good CRM should, can be automated to do many features through the integration of apps.
It has a lot of functionalities (website and administration) all included in the same platform. If it worked properly, it allows you to organise a conference paper-free.
Multilingual issues. Although it is advertised as multilingual, it didn’t really work as such. The many issues that popped up throughout the conference preparation were fixed little by little at a cost in time, from help desk emails and to struggles with the unfriendly UX.
Admin pages reloaded every time you clicked on a button (their developers seem to ignore Ajax technologies). It was time-consuming and required constant page searches.
Inflexibility in many of the supposed functionalities it offers.
Certificates were not modifiable nor custom when we had to send them (it was solved months after the conference finished when we were surprisingly contacted by the help desk).
Problems with the size of images to be displayed on the site, very small fonts and limited options to display content. We had to hire a professional developer in order to get a graphically consistent and presentable website.
Very poor mobile version. Too big margins, unreadable text, endless text blocks and lists, distorted pictures, etc.
Issues with the ordering of the authors’ names for different proposals (authorship being so important in research).
Fixed, inflexible fields in the contact sheets, speakers info, and so on.
Special character issues (due to Latin characters and other types used in linguistic research).
Not being able to include links in the HTML editor due to Dryfta's inadvertent decisions to block them.
Only one Superadmin user allowed to access the full functionalities of the platform, so we had to share it (consequently not knowing who did each action).
Problems with the generation of reports and the high complexity of their interface.
Some issues on the mandatory anonymity. The double-blind review process not fully respected due to unclear user info and options, with other issues coming up on the go such as unwanted info in automated notifications and messages in the Welcome dashboard.
Not being able to use the other payment methods on the platform because they were incompatible with the conference country.
Missing information and time wasted when creating events for sessions with info that already existed in the server that randomly failed to be selected. These issues were reported even with video proofs (help desk didn’t believe us), and were never solved. We had to repeat the same processes again and again, never knowing what was going on
Integrating the Viator / Trip Advisor API so that the encrypted customer emails can show up in Xola and the client may be emailed from inside Xola. Viator says that other platforms allow this but Xola is still lagging on this one.
Some minor tweaks allow the integrated tipping app to append a more customized message.
Really trying hard to find something else to say because Xola does everything really well.
It was quick, that's all we can say. Quite a few times they sorted out the problems and issues. But, sadly, sometimes their answers were useless and irritating (not addressing the problem or simply ignoring it, "passing the buck"). In some cases, they pretended the problem didn't exist and we had to send them videos as proof. No response to that.
Xola has many similar features but in the end, the friendly fast 24/7 free always on and always ready to help customer support blows everyone else away. Many times I have found Xola to be able to expedite a customer issue or confusion with software integration or support for their software in a way that saves $$$ because my reservationists can resolve the issue or their confusion and quickly get back to work.
The overall performance was okay in the end, but it was due to our team's commitment and effort. Without that extra work, the results would have been awful.
