Gist vs. Groove by OptimizeCX

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

Groove is great for people who are wanting to provide accountability and organization for teams across your business. It is suited well for an organization that has many email requests coming in every day, because you can assign tickets to specific team members. It would not be suited for an organization that utilizes more phone support, than email support

• 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

• Creates Tickets when someone emails in or you can create a ticket within the groove system.
• They have great reports on response times and the average amount of time it took for a ticket to close. You can even see individuals average response times as well as specific teams.
• We use their Knowledge Base which is a great tool for creating FAQ and sending people to that.

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.

• Better Follow-up by customer success team
• More customization within their major features to fit both, large and small sales teams, alike
• Their site goes down fairly often

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.

It's well organized, but slow.

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

I'm giving them a 3 for the really great support they gave for general questions. They also have a good knowledge base. I'm giving them only a 3 though because of my last customer service when I need a billing resolution. I was very disappointed in how they handled that. I also find it very bad practice to send out ONE email notice that they were raising my rate three times as much at the end of the month. When I was with Desk.com, I had numerous emails over months letting me know their billing plans were changing. Even worse than refusing to refund me the difference was that they just stopped responding to me.

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.

We also use Trello for project management. I have used both systems and we like Groove because it allows for our clients to contact us via email. They do not have to go to a ticket submission page, they can just email us directly and it will create a ticket. Groove also provides analytics on how long it takes to respond to tickets

• 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.

• We wasted a lot of time setting up the product before we discovered a lot of features listed on the website aren't ready for public use