Emplifi vs. Salesforce Agentforce Commerce

- Very well suited to grabbing top-level and more in-depth social performance data, across campaigns and BAU activity. - Not as well suited for moments where you need benchmarking or context of your performance compared with a previous time frame. This can be a bit clunky to go back and forth with as it requires multiple dashboards or consistent manual time-frame changes.

Incentivized

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is well suited for medium to large sized eCommerce platforms (mainly B2C but B2B could work as well) who are looking to streamline their web processes and website functionalities while incorporating multiple departments. If you are a small business and have tighter margins, this may not be the best choice for you as there may not be as many opportunities to utilize all of the CRM's features and you may be at a financial loss because of it. Otherwise, this platform is great for organization and providing a helping hand in your eCommerce roadmap!

Incentivized

• Publishing - takes a bit of time, but publishing all content together makes planning and execution much more efective
• Community - really simple one board collecting of all our social messages makes replying simple
• dashboards - widgets and customisation allow for multiple dashboards tracking various campaigns and goals

Incentivized

• Demandware business manager features a very robust set of options to accomplish many merchandising and content tasks out of the box. For typical retailers, there are usually very simple ways to accomplish common tasks.
• The ability to schedule content and tie unique content to session data is particularly useful and fully featured.
• Many features that would typically be missing from a home-grown CMS and would require development are included in business manager and easily controlled by marketers.

Incentivized

• Would love more robust search parameters for labels. ex. search for tickets labeled 'Availability' AND 'United States' but excluding any that are only one of those labels
• Ability to break conversations into multiple tickets; so labels can be more accurate if the same person reaches out again after 3 months with a totally different question
• The social account quick view doesn't always load the follower count for people reaching out to us. it makes it slower to manager messages from high level creators

• The #1 pain with Demandware as a developer has been Pipelines. Originally development on this platform was designed as a visual drag, drop, and configure model. You would create these logic flows (pipelines) in the visual editor, made up of nodes (pipelets) and connectors. These quickly got out of hand and turned into a spiderweb. Worse they were not like anything that most developers are used to. Pipelines save to XML but the markup was not clean and difficult to merge or diff, to say the least. I guess they were aiming for a more simple model but quickly realized that was not sufficient for real-world applications. To their credit, Demandware recognized this and has been steadily moving toward a clean, pure-code model.
• The benefits of SaaS and the quick release cycle can be a mixed blessing. Features and API's can and do change from time to time. When you're using a platform like this you cannot build it and forget about it. It's not obvious to everyone but you're signing up for some amount of maintenance over time to keep things up to date.
• The platform has a flaw that still hasn't been resolved. Each Demandware customer "realm" has many instances for development, staging, production, etc. All of the instances have their own user accounts and passwords, and you have to log in to each instance separately. It's very frustrating as an admin or developer, though less so to business users who will only need to access one instance. Demandware could really use a Single Sign On!
• Demandware has a marketplace for third-party extensions to add pre-build integrations with other systems. While there is a reasonably broad selection of third-party vendors, I have to point out that the quality of many of these components has been sub-par. There are a few gems but many are clunky and quickly cobbled together, and surely require further investment of time. Demandware needs to do a better job of quality assurance with third-party vendors.

Incentivized

the balance between quality and price si perfectperfect for agency that have many client to manage, because it helps us to save time (we don't have to plan content from every single account, only one click to look at different community and moderate...)it also help the team works: senior can review content direcly from emplifi; labeling DM/comments as done help us to track where a collegue stop and we have to startIt makes the content approval from clients very easy

Incentivized

A huge factor influencing our decision to remain on the Demandware platform is that our new parent company is standardizing all its luxury brands in the US on it. We are fortunate. However, even if we had remained an independent company, I believe we would continue on the Demandware platform for all the reasons outlined in this review. I appreciate the stability the platform has provided to our eCommerce site in the last three years as well as the continuous improvements and technological advances being rolled out that will allow us to keep the site fresh, engaging, modern and stable. I've heard many horror stories from colleagues on other platforms who struggle with the expense and complexity involved with making what should be minor and simple changes and updates to their sites.

Since the main use of the Live Advisor is on the website that doesn't have e-commerce capabilities, it has been challenging to attach an specific metric to Emplifi's solutions and their usability in our websites. The Live Advisor is helping us to deliver our unique sale proposition in digital channels, which is great, but it is difficult to assign a higher mark in usability due to the limitation just explained.

Incentivized

The overall ease of using the system. Consolidation in location for our team members. Mobile application for on the go research, as many of our team members are constantly traveling to job sites or to meet clients. No more duplicate calls to current customers, since we have 12 different divisions that span the company. Mostly the ability to look at the database when our team members begin cultivating a new
lead/prospect with a potential customer to see if anyone within the team has a
relationship with that person or the company they work for.

Incentivized

We have only had one instance where the platform went down in the time we have been using it.

Every time I've reached out to our account manager or even support in general, they've been there. I love the fact that I can always ask for help. Also, the chat function within the tool is helpful as well. It is something I always look for in a solution because when you're in the middle of working, and there is an issue, you can quickly reach out and get an answer.

Incentivized

They are very responsive and a support technician will be assigned quickly. Even if there is further clarification needed for the ticket, or a solution is not immediately available, you feel that someone is there and staying on top of the issue. Most common issues are resolved quickly and satisfactorily.

Incentivized

The in-person training was thorough. Trainer was pretty dry, but covered everything really well.

The online training was fine but, in the end, the best way to learn any product is by actually using it.

The platform is so easy to understand that no "expensive consulting firm" is necessary to implement it!

Implementation went fairly smoothly.

Its so much better and more stable and easier to work with their team If you're on Agora you should switch, you wont regret it and you'll probably get a better price. I used to deal with Agora breaking in some odd way every week, and Emplifi Service Cloud hasn't broken in any way in the almost a year we've used it.

All relative to your organizational size. Shopify works for small to mid, Magento for small to large, commerce tools would be a large-scale plus. Hire a skilled consultant to help you make a decision of this caliber!

Incentivized

• Volaris was able to improve their positive sentiment by 7% in their user-generated content (UGC).
• The optimization of content management workflows led to them becoming the second-most-popular airline brand in Mexico and the USA in 2022 according to Emplifi.
• By tracking our content performance with Emplifi, we were able to improve our creatives and increase the total shares by 15% vs. previous the year.

Incentivized

• Salesforce Commerce Cloud ends up paying for itself in the long run so long as customers are taking advantage of its full capabilities.
• I would highly recommend trying it or consulting a partner like us about it if you have an interest and think you could benefit. A thorough business analysis will tell you if this segment of Salesforce is right for your objectives.

Incentivized