Constant Contact delivers for small businesses with tools to simplify and amplify digital marketing. Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM is a marketing and sales platform developed to help businesses build their pipeline, nurture leads and close more deals. The tools are designed to help businesses attract the right leads, nurture them with personalized content, and grow with better conversion.
Attract
- Acquires hot leads faster with email & social marketing, plus retargeting…
$449
per month
Freshdesk
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that helps businesses of all sizes to deliver customer support.
Freshdesk converts requests coming in via email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets, and unifies ticket resolution across channels. Additionally, Freshdesk lets the user automate workflows, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics, to stay on top of customer support. Freshdesk also offers out-of-the-box features like an AI-powered support chatbot,…
I think SharpSpring is overall a better option, especially for mid-size businesses. The platform is much less costly than Salesforce and depending on your contact list, can be less costly than HubSpot as well. The features are great and it allows you to grow with it as your …
When I started to work at IHR, they used to manage their contacts with two CRMs. I configured the fields to homologize them. With Sugar, they only used to register the opportunities and the detail of each product that they sold. We started to configure the campaigns since …
SharpSpring is on par with other automation tools that cost much more. The feature set is very similar and it provides similar results. The price point makes it a no-brainer for many businesses. It's also nice that SharpSpring does not require contracts and can be used on a …
We selected Freshdesk because of the feature/cost benefits. Zendesk was much more expensive. Many of the other support tools don't have a very good UI. Freshdesk is easy to use, even for non-technical people. It has all the features we need to manage our support process. Zendesk…
SharpSpring is great for creating and tracking campaigns that span multiple channels. With the Salesforce integration, we are able to keep our Sales team focused inside Salesforce without them needing to learn a new tool. Our Marketing team uses SharpSpring to nurture leads before handing them off to the Sales team. Though the features are available, SharpSpring would not be suitable for social media management or blogs; our third-party tools do a better job at that.
Using a collection of Skill Based Ticket Assignment, Ticket Allocation, and alerts, we’ve been able to bring our average resolution time to under half our previous time. This is done by making sure the right tickets get to the right agents, and by ensuring agents are followed up on to ensure they do not forget deadlines on tickets in their queue. Furthermore, tickets which would be open for weeks due to lack of a client response are now closed automatically following a prompt email to the end-user
Their Emailers are very easy to construct and user-friendly. It takes your Newsletter and sales emails to the next level, especially with the action groups and trigger functionalities.
The life of the lead functionality allows you to see when leads get warmer, so you know when to send them what. Helps improve conversions.
Follow up on all conversations that enter and are easy to use by the employee and save responses ready for use.
Find out the average rate of the number of conversations that occur in the company and conduct the analysis.
There is a feature it allows one to take a permit in the name of the employee who responds to the conversation and to know the problem faced by the customer and the solution.
The landing page builder is a bit hard to use. Doesn’t have much flexibility.
Sometimes confusing between types of workflows to use. Opportunity versus visual.
If you imported contacts that weren’t formatted correctly. It is hard to delete a bull amount. Need to type DELETE for each one manually. No bull options to make changes.
Ticket templates and canned responses should be able to be used interchangeably. We frequently have the same response in both fields.
The spam filter can be a little too aggressive. We have had issues with tickets being accidentally marked as spam then filtering incorrectly for weeks at a time.
Freshdesk doesn't quite have the right integrations with our other providers (Vonage, and Avochato, to name a few).
We have been very impressed with all aspects of this software and the potential for it to radically change how we operate is huge! Support has been exceptional and we have discovered many extra uses for the software than originally thought. Not only will it give us benefits for our company's growth, but for our client's growth as well.
We are extremely happy with Freshdesk and can foresee using it for the next year. We might only consider using a different platform if our average daily ticket volume reaches four digits and its AI isn’t enough to handle our needs by then. While we haven’t tested this yet, we have read reviews that it’s AI capabilities are lacking
This rating is coming from an administrative perspective. With so many features, workflows, dashboards, and more, there is certainly a lot going on, and even the most savvy software user can get a little overwhelmed when trying to decide how to best implement and utilize the platform to its full potential. That being said, the SharpSpring platform is well-implemented and well-organized, with most solutions being fairly intuitive, once you have a grasp of the software. It is fairly easy to learn, but difficult to master. Just like any powerful platform, however, the complexity is worth it, and once you are comfortable navigating and problem solving within SharpSpring, it becomes a great marketing and sales tool which can do virtually anything you need it to.
I gave it a rating of 9 out of 10 because they delivered on everything we asked them to do. Easy to setup, easy to deploy to end users, easy to customize, easy to enter tickets and so much more. Our experience with their support is top notch! After opening a ticket for support they call use back within 10 minutes every time!
I have encountered a lot of errors in the Freshdesk, however, they tend to resolve it on priority or at least they will share the timeline by when this can be resolved. Most of the time the issue has been from the other partner's end. They take time to resolve their vendor issues and they don't have any timelines in case of developed app errors.
The reports take a lot of time to download if the time period is large. Also, the tickets take their sweet time to open and load. It is not fast as Zendesk. Only 30 tickets are visible in a single go and there isn't any option to select all. If we need to change the pages and dashboards it takes a lot of time to open.
The support is great which really helps overcome challenges if you become stuck and the training videos are great too. Same-day replies are great and I even got some help with some CSS code on the chat. Not many organizations would do this or even respond.
The main thing about Freshdesk user service is that once a request has been made for information about a feature of the platform, the support team responds to tickets quickly, within a day of writing and submitting them, with information that is concise enough so that there is no need to ask for help on the same topic again.
In-person training is provided to all the agents and it is very easy to learn the basics of the Freshdesk interface. Solving tickets via dashboards, replying to the guest queries in bulk via Freshdesk. The training which is a bit hard is creating the logic according to the ticket flow and intergeration.
This tool is no doubt easy to learn but in-person training is a lot better than online training. It takes time to grasp things in the online training, however, in pandemic we have done all the training online. Apart from a bit more time we haven't faced any issues with online training.
Overall I would say to be patient and bring everyone who will be touching the platform to the onboarding sessions. The Virtual Classroom lets you onboard as quickly or slowly as you want. Sales, marketing, design, account management, get 'em all in on it. For the most part, they will be happy to use this platform. I recommend getting as many people as possible to see the SharpSpring demo.
Not applicable. I have never used a support desk system before and FreshDesk had already been implemented at my company before I joined. I am not involved in financial decisions and I have no opinion on buzzwords like "time to productivity" and "time to value"
We use different CRMs for different clients, mostly due to budget and other requirements. SharpSpring from Constant Contact is in the middle, price-wise, but is slightly more user-friendly than ActiveCampaign when it comes to certain things, such as drip campaigns and workflows. Though the price can be prohibitive to some clients, it is extremely robust. I definitely prefer the list-building, the ability to send smart emails and the WYSIWYG editor.
FreshDesk was the best combination of ease of use and price. While inexpensive, even the lowest tier offered more functionality than the other guys, and the learning curve is almost nonexistent so it's easy to add new agents and get them up to speed quickly instead of having them spend days getting use to the UI.
The pricing we had taken is on yearly basis but the subscription and billing frequency that we have is on monthly basis. I would not want to make any changes to it, it is a seamless process with all the contract terms and we both agreed on it. It should be as per the customer's need.
The product they have developed is amazing. They have made different products for emails, tickets, chats & calls as well. It is flexible according to multiple departments. The finance team can use it, the Customer support team is using it, we can use it in call centres, emails etc. We can use these tickets internally as well to create child tickets and assign them to different departments for query resolution.
Streamlined Processes - sales and marketing are now all in the same place.
Reduced Number of Platforms/Tools - CRM/lead management, email, automation, landing pages, forms, etc are all in the same place rather than using multiple tools.
Time-saving - sales pipeline is very easy to use for sales. For marketing, we have dozens of workflows that eliminate much of our manual processes from the past.
Return on Investment - We're more focused on moving the building the business than ever before because SharpSpring has simplified so many of our business operations and we're seeing massive results!
Lead generation - Up SIGNIFICANTLY (between 3x & 4x) since setting up SharpSpring.
