Grasshopper vs. Text-Em-All vs. Twilio

Grasshopper is well suited for basic needs of texting in and out as well as calling out if you would like to avoid using your personal line. It also eliminates the need to have a dedicated land land in your office or business. You can obtain a vanity number and forward calls through grasshopper.

Incentivized

We have found them to be very good for immediate communication of a brief message to a large number of people at once. Thus, it works perfectly for a neighborhood association. It may not be suitable for longer messages or situations with excessive notifications.

Incentivized

I found Twilio to be excellent and very easy to use for a programmer in all aspects related to voice, SMS, and other features utilizing their API. I found the node client to be excellent and helpful. We previously used the Apex client for Salesforce before it was discontinued. Although we try not to use Twilio from Apex anymore, using that client was easier than implementing our own.

Incentivized

• I like that there are differing voicemails for each extension, to keep up with the image of calling a separate line.
• I love the voicemail text emails. I believe we pay a little extra, but worth every penny for those urgent calls while I am in a meeting.
• The cost is very reasonable for the value added to our company.

Incentivized

• Scheduled delivery: works as it should every time and is SUPER convenient.
• Mass contact upload: I was able to pull a report to excel and it loaded PERFECTLY to ‘Contacts’
• Feedback: if anyone doesn’t get the message, I will know almost immediately.

Incentivized

• Easy to see my team in one place, when they log in and out and what call status they are in.
• Twilio is a simple, user friendly way to log in and out of work activities.
• Excellent services and support.
• The omnichannel feature which allows agents to get request from all channels.

Incentivized

• It would be nice to have the ability to transfer some calls to another Grasshopper IVR, for those customers who mistakenly dial the wrong number (we have two incoming numbers, one for corporate and one for sales).
• Likewise, it would be nice to have the ability to forward to a toll-free number, which would have allowed us to work around the inability to transfer between IVRs (see above).
• Lastly, it would be great to have an 'emergency' switch setting (default off but could be toggled on) that would let us override all IVR settings and transfer all incoming calls elsewhere (either to a direct dial or toll free number) for those rare times when we cannot take any calls (such as a weather emergency OR the one time each year we take all of our staff on a retreat) - that would allow us to send all calls to a backup answering service rather than just voicemail.

Incentivized

• My initial concern was regarding the "opt out" feature. I work with the senior population, and many of whom are not that tech-savvy. I have a couple of residents who had unintentionally opted out of messages thinking it was an individual message they were skipping. I would suggest that there be a clarifying question when a user chooses to opt out; it should default to opting out of a single message and survey the user to see if they would like to opt out of receiving additional messages. My residents were wondering why they were missing information and why I hadn't informed them of important dates and events.

Incentivized

• Segment’s email identifier is case-sensitive, which is ridiculous because emails themselves are not case-sensitive. This means that if I send a capitalized email address in an identify call, it will create a duplicate user rather than matching it with the lowercase email. I think this is a technical oversight that should be corrected.
• I’d like to see more information about the eventual transition of existing Frontline customers to Twilio Flex
• I’d like to see some integrations between Twilio Studio and OpenAI or another open source LLM to provide automated responses, if this hasn’t been done already
• I would like to be able to drag and move the actual lines connecting the steps in Twilio Studio, sometimes mine can get pretty messy
• I think a Bug Report form would be beneficial for developers

Incentivized

Text-Em-All is a great way to get messages to our associates versus posting on a memo board and hoping they see it. Very efficient. I would recommend this great tool to companies big or small as a form of business related communications. The only thing I would change is the ability to use more characters in the messages. And it would be a plus if you can translate to different languages in the app.

Incentivized

Unless we can get this handled quickly -- less than 1 week -- we will likely switch to another provider who, in my opinion, we'll have to spend close to $3,000 in development time to build a new integration for texting. Our clients need texting and I feel Twilio has failed us miserably.

Incentivized

The admin functions are kind of confusing in the old interface which was my most recent experience on the admin side.

Incentivized

It's fantastic. In general, it's a 10. But I give it a 7 because of the way I know it can improve. I save my workers' names in lists...and I have only the first and last name fields to classify them. I grade my workers based on their experiences and based on their jobs; so I use the last name field to group them. This could be easier by you adding another field.

Incentivized

Twilio has well documented APIs and examples. There are several tutorials, videos and Q&As regarding their services. So, usability is very good. I must say that advanced knowledge of telephony, API/Programming and error-handling is essential to make good use of Twilio. It's not just plug-and-play unless you are integrated with a system that has all of the programming built for it.

Incentivized

The availability of the text em all is amazing specially when we needed the most to spread out the word on an event that was happening.

Incentivized

I love the performance it provided us. Also, want to clarify that the time it takes to send out a mass text is amazing

Incentivized

Twilio executes what it is designed to do: send SMS messages at scale while providing very good deliverability. I believe that Twilio is very good at what we use for adding SMS messages to our comms strategy. We can see those messages get opened and replied to, which is exactly what we are looking to achieve.

Incentivized

When I was setting up my account I contacted support a couple of times. They were also very professional, personable, and helpful. Their response is prompt and thorough. I'm confident I can get any question answered as well as help with any issue I might have. That's pretty important to me.

Incentivized

There have been few times over the last 18 years that I have had to make changes to our billing or deal with particular tech questions and I have never had any issues with their response time or ability to be helpful once the issues were communicated

Incentivized

I have not had to communicate with Twilio support in the last 3 years but my past experience with them has been very positive. They replied to my previous requests promptly and kept me well informed to resolve my inquiries. With their documentation that's available, I hardly imagine why anyone would need to contact support since it's all there in a concise and easy to understand format. It would probably take you longer to type out a support ticket than to just open their doc websites.

Incentivized

This was the best way we were able to reach out to everyone we wanted to, being that there were some not tech-sabi elderly people. This was a better way for them to be able to get the information they needed.

Incentivized

The developer APIs and SDKs are super easy to follow.

Incentivized

I have not used any other phone services like Grasshopper. I know that there is another option out there called Ruby, which is more like a virtual receptionist but since I did not try it out I cannot compare the two. When I started my company I found the services that Grasshopper offers to be perfect. It still works for us and we have no need to change to anything else right now.

Incentivized

Our last provider was costly for what we needed. We need the ability to text, and that's it. The sense was challenging to navigate; I had to sign a one-year contract and pay thousands upfront. Text-em-all has been the best thing.

Incentivized

We evaluated many fundraising-based text-to-give programs and found the subscriptions prohibitively expensive for our small scale and uncertain first few years of development. While we may be willing to invest that kind of money after discovering how things work, we're happy with Twilio now and have no desire to start over.

Incentivized

Seems like a fair price for the product

Incentivized

Being in South Africa, direct local currency support would be nice

Incentivized

We have never had a problem being able to use Text em all when we needed it

Incentivized

• It's allowed us to keep cost down. Other phone systems can seriously get outrageous in implementation and monthly fees!
• It's allowed our team the confidence to work in locations outside of the office and still be seen as professionals.
• It's decreased the amount of time spent on unwanted sales calls via the call screening application.

Incentivized

• We definitely have a higher response rate when we contact applicants via text message; it seems to be the thing people check more often than email now.
• It saves us a lot of time wasted before with "phone tag" when employees are unable to immediately to take a call.

Incentivized

• It helps drive the adoption of multi-factor authentication by making second-factor authentication quick and easy.
• Decreases the number of times a user spends migrating to a new device from an old one.
• Enables easy access to second-factors of authentication by offering multi-device support, making multi-factor authentication painless.

Incentivized