Groove is a sales engagement platform that enables sales leaders to execute their strategy in a smarter and more adaptive way. With Groove, revenue leaders can use automation to do more with less, with the goal of driving greater efficiency and effectiveness across the customer lifecycle. Groove states they enable more than 75,000 users at ADP, Google, Uber, iHeartMedia, Capital One, and other large enterprises.
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HCL Sametime
Score 8.0 out of 10
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HCL Sametime (formerly IBM Lotus Sametime, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in 2018) is an enterprise-level unified communications and VoIP platform. It includes features such as instant messaging, web conferencing, voice and video integration, telephony capabilities, and presence information.
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Kixie
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Kixie is a telephony and VoIP software solution from Kixie.
We switched to Groove from Cirrus Insight, which was extremely unreliable & buggy. We also demo'd Ebsta, but my sales team preferred the user experience Groove offered; they found it smoother & a more natural integration with Salesforce and Gmail.
Groove is excellent for the use case of improving sales representative and customer success representative productivity and data quality when used alongside Salesforce. It is a Salesforce focused tool. You should definitely consider Groove if you are a current Salesloft / Outreach user and you also use Salesforce.
Groove would not be a good fit for an organization not using Salesforce.
Sametime is well suited for very quick conversations, where you know the person is an active Sametime user. It also serves as an easy way to reach out to someone you may not know when looking for an answer to a quick question, as they are likely to be a Sametime user. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to use Sametime for Audio or Video chat. The quality and reliability are horrendous.
Sametime's web-based interfaces are "zero load", requiring no plug-ins to be installed to join a meeting, launch a meeting, or use chat in a browser. A plugin is required only if you want to share your screen.
Integration with IBM Notes is very tight. Sametime's chat status can change according to your Notes calendar. You can easily see if someone who just emailed you is available to chat. Your chat History is right inside Notes as well.
IBM's mobile apps are top notch. We automated the apps for our users thanks to IBM's work with third party MDMs. This made it very simple for us to deploy the Sametime mobile apps -- Chat and Meetings -- and get new capabilities such as Audio & Video mobilized quickly.
No down time, ever. The rock solid WebSphere back-end of Sametime means the environment is always up. Period.
Kixie integrates seamlessly with our CRM (Zoho), meaning it updates call notes directly on the customer's CRM profile.
The one-click dialing feature directly through our CRM is a great feature. It's so simple; just search for a name, one-click, and you are on the phone.
The local presence feature is a nice touch for cold calls. It provides a local area code when cold calling to increase the likelihood of an answer to the call.
I actually don't have any complaint regarding groove. It's just that I will give 9 since I confidently believe that there'd be updates in the future which would be more optimal not just for us users but for the business as well. The only regret I have with groove is I was not able to use it before the current company that I'm employed
Sametime is now an embedded experience for our users. They know it, they like it, they use it, and they expect it to be wherever they are. Because it is pretty easy to use and NEVER goes down, users know they can rely on it and won't be frustrated by it. Sametime is right up with there with Microsoft Office in terms of user adoption and appreciation.
Groove has been an awesome platform to use for sales pipeline management. I really enjoy how it integrates with my Salesforce, Gmail, and Google Calendar. It makes my job easier by helping me keep track of the progress of each sales contact that I have. Leads are able to reply and notify us using Groove.
Just about everything works the way you expect it would and it's relatively easy for users to figure out. Sametime was one of those things that we started with only a few people as a "test" and before the test period was done we discovered a few hundred people had figured out how to log in and most got it working all on their own. Many of our users want to use Sametime and do so regularly; we do not have to create policies enforcing its usage. Users find it practical to use Sametime to do things like chat, transfer files, share their screen, and so forth.
Kixie provides a nice user interface. There is a bit of a learning curve to load leads but it's not difficult. It's just learning where to go and how to load lists for the reps. Once you have it figured out, it's easy to get lists loaded for reps and give them the ability to manage those leads
Typically if Sametime is not available, it's because Windows Updates were done on the servers and they were not rebooted. However, that's not a problem with Sametime -- in fact, if you have Linux you could probably run Sametime for years without any hiccups whatsoever. We have no internal Linux expertise.
Generally very good. Occasionally AV or screen-sharing will stutter and every now and then I hear of it dropping out altogether, but in all cases it was easy to re-establish
My company has a team dedicated to supporting our implementation of operative tools and business systems such as Groove. For this reason, I feel that we have ample support for Groove, although I have not personally contacted Groove for any support issues.
At Nearpod, I have been impressed with the internal expertise and support around Groove as a key tool for the Sales and Customer Success business systems and operations.
Groove is simple. Like their competitors, they give you the ability to create templated "Flows" (sequences) of calls, emails, and LinkedIn touches. Some of them can be automated, but it's also simple to personalize outreach. Ultimately, my decision to purchase Groove over some of the competitors was based on their Salesforce integration, as well as white-glove customer service.
We use Jabber globally in our company and Symphony (no relevant app in able list) in some of the teams as well. All these are instant messenger tools, but Sametime is the easiest one to be used and its chat history is easy to be searched. Sametime can be used to contact almost all internal staff as it’s included in default computer package. Symphony is used to chat with front end business while Jabber is used for call.
Sametime is rock solid. It runs on WebSphere, DB2 and other related IBM technologies. This does mean the back-end is highly complex and very difficult to learn and get comfortable with, however.
Reduced several hours a week of logging time in Salesforce that either wouldn't get done or would have been done to the detriment of more value add activities.
Saves hours per week by delivering actionable/useful info from Salesforce into Gmail
Gives me valuable insight on what emails are being opened and read. This helps plan targeting.
