Gist vs. HelpCrunch vs. Ruby Virtual Receptionist Services

If your marketing model is selling products, services, or SAAS where you are doing inbound marketing and your website will do most of the lead generation and conversion, this is a great product. From live chat, support, event tracking, and automation, you could almost put your entire business on autopilot. If your marketing model is mostly outreach to cold leads and conversion, this software currently does not have any type of sales stages or task generation. I would still use Gist for website inbound but use another software for outreach and cold leads then when they become a lead put them into Gist for marketing automation.

Incentivized

Pros: - It is very easy to deploy out of the box. - Has good integration with most large scale platform and Operating Systems. Cons: - Because it is SaaS based, the used cases are very specific.

Incentivized

Ruby Virtual Receptionist Services is well suited for a business that needs call screening and message-taking services. The service is expensive but if the user is willing to put a lot of time and effort into planning and scriptwriting, as well as call handling instructions, it may work well. Also, if there is not much information that must be captured by the receptionist, I feel this may be a better fit.

Incentivized

• Customer service via a unified inbox so you dont have to separately monitor your twitter, Facebook or IG account for consumer communication there. Gist unified all into one inbox, better than anyone else I've seen in the market. They archive all communications and tie them back to a single user so you get unified customer history / data.
• Marketing segmentation and automation: they track user history and behavior across the site and have super detailed segmenting capability, on par with ActiveCampaign's, but better I'd say. Better UI for the marketing admin person, and more unified data than in AC.
• Live chat and chatbot. Usually it's either one or the other but with Gist you can do both seamlessly.

Incentivized

• Fastest time to market - set up the application fast and easy.
• The tags, filters, automated messaging and pop-ups are the best way to keep the potential customers engaged and achieve higher productivity.
• Coolest dashboard where I can find all tabs, data, analytics, and insights to make better decisions and provide ultimate customer experience.

• Call-out request "personal assistant services."
• Ruby Receptionist app.

Incentivized

• Plan limits can be confusing. For example, there is a monthly charge for support and a monthly charge for "growth," plus there's a separate charge depending on how many contacts and seats you have. Perhaps this is normal in the industry, but it can make it a little challenging to understand the bill every month.
• The vast amount of features means development will never be as fast as you'd like it to be (even though they release updates all the time). This may not actually be a valid concern, and it certainly isn't unique to Gist (who doesn't have a wishlist they're waiting on their favorite SaaS to get to?), but I do believe the likelihood of being stuck without your desired feature being developed goes up a lot as the product gets bigger and bigger.
• Email deliverability has been less than perfect in the past, but it has improved drastically in the last year.

• Not found any so far

• Clarity in billing.
• Shortened hold times.
• Less transfer time from call to receptionist (between English and Spanish).
• Better training of receptionists to prevent certain things from being said to clients - decreases client confidence.

Incentivized

Gist is a quite reliable service with a lot of added values. We don't need to pay for different Saas for these important features. If I had an issue the team was super responsive and helpful, that is essential for every business. The email delivery is great, so virtually no email has landed into spam folder

Incentivized

It’s pretty simple, but it does a lot so there are more complicated features which depend on an individuals ability for software implementation. I am not an IT expert and I’ve managed to implement everything myself, others that are more tech-minded may find everything easier.

Fantastic support. Ask a question, get an answer within 24 hours every time. And sometimes within a few minutes. They've always come through for me, helpful and, even when it's an issue on my end, they point me in the right direction.

Incentivized

Always available, very knowledgeable, faster resolution.

Gist combines all our previous products into one application and adds many more features that would require more apps. Gist is excellent and a no-brainer all-in-one application when compared to having to manage multiple applications at higher cost. The support from the whole Gist team has been extremely responsive.

HelpCrunch is more affordable than other alternatives on the market and offers better customer support.

We switched over from Answer First to Ruby Receptionist because we wanted a more full-service answering service. We wanted to be able to call out using our business number as well as text in and out. We also really liked the "call-out request" feature as it freed up our time and allowed Ruby to handle minor client communications, etc.

Incentivized

• They are perfect for me as a someone who needs a lot of bang for the buck. The chat messenger device on my website alone has brought me new prospects that I did not have to spend money recruiting.
• I am able to save hours of time with the automated emails that are GDPR compliant.
• I don't have to pay for a designer to have excellent looking emails either.

• Great price point.
• Effective self service platform.
• Good alerting solution.

Incentivized

• Increased efficiency.
• NEGATIVE ROI.

Incentivized