Extole vs. Talon.One

Anyone that has a business with a high NPS score should take advantage of this acquisition channel. If your business isn't promotional in nature (i.e., doesn't offer discounts), this type of program may not be as effective. It is important for both the advocate and the recipient to get something out of it. If only the advocate gets rewarded, it will likely diminish your returns.

I see Talon.One as best suited for small or medium sized businesses - less than 50k customers. The reason being, I do not see the scalability of the tool; it is the classic what-you-see-is-what-you-get. On the positive, because you get all of it out of the box, it makes it very simple to have one or two people dedicated to administration and development. Additionally, Talon.One won't be contacting you for more money just to use a feature

Incentivized

• Track advocates and reward friends.
• Fraud prevention/Abuse of incentive program.
• Reporting is easy and provides good insights.

• The interface is great. Very clean and easy to use.
• Their support team is top notch!
• The speed at which you can test a code after creation is unrivaled.

Incentivized

• Lacks geo filtering capabilities (i..e, ability to serve refer a friend only to visitors from specific countries). Our team had to put that logic in place on our side instead of relying on Extole.
• Platform requires assistance from account manager for some actions/features that should be in the hand of the client.
• Quality Control has been an issue at time. Our program has gone down because a new global platform update went out and affected our implementation. Extole has been responsive in these types of incidents, but that should not happen.

• Learning the vocabulary of the tool was the most challenging for me.
• There are some things that take too many clicks, like user administration.
• It isn't obvious where the help tools are located, especially when struggling with the code logic.

Incentivized

More robust on fraud side. Good support.

For clarity, I am only comparing the discount code feature from Salesforce vs. the entire platform. In Salesforce, creating a code was an arduous process, then we had to wait for the sync job to run with our web services engine (every 10 minutes) to see if what we had created was functioning correctly. Do the math: If configuration takes 10 minutes, you have to wait a total of 20 minutes to test it, then if it doesn't work, try again in 15-20 minutes. Over an 8-hour day, you aren't accomplishing anything! TalonOne made it so simple. 10-15 minutes of configuration time, then near immediate testing time. We were able to create and troubleshoot a discount code in a couple of hours rather than a couple of days

Incentivized

• It took a few months to become ROI positive with Extole, but the ROAS has been good since. It probably represents about 2% of our new customers per month.

• TalonOne's capabilities and administration tools made it incredibly easy to setup, saving us days in testing with our previous tool.
• The detailed logging features helped us drill down to the exact step in the process that was failing.
• The reporting features helped us track customer usage and engagement across all of our markets.

Incentivized