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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Sprinklr Service
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Sprinklr Service is a cloud-native unified customer service platform powered by AI that enables seamless customer & agent experience across 30+ digital, social and voice channels, and delivers real-time actionable & scalable insights. Sprinklr Service – Enables customers to interact with a brand on their preferred channel for a consistent brand experience. Empowers agents with unified/360 customer view and…
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.
Sprinklr Modern Care is great when paired with a chatbot or with larger, more complex teams that have varied skill sets or languages. It is also great for smaller, niche focus teams as it provides the majority of what all organizations will require from routing, to case assignment to governance and reporting
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.
Merge topics: I work for a TV show website and TV fans often write in asking the same questions (ie: How do I watch a show? Has ____ been canceled? etc). The ability to merge duplicate questions to one master FAQ topic allows managers to keep our community organized, keep track of how many people have the same question, and save time that would otherwise be spent replying to each person individually.
Multiple management seats/levels: Sprinklr Modern Care allows managers to delegate community management tasks to interns and moderators by giving them access to certain features of our forum without giving them "full control" of our account.
Official responses: We're able to make sure our employee responses don't get lost in the shuffle of busy conversation on our forums by marking certain responses as "official." This adds a special badge to important replies and pins them to the top, so users can more easily access the most relevant/accurate response to the issue they're reporting or question they're asking.
Easy moderator sorting/view: The manager console allows community managers to customize the way they view the forum, and therefore more easily spot high-priority items. Sort by post date, number of replies on a topic, or filter posts to view topics that have not yet been addressed by an employee to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
I find it difficult to dive into analytics for each social post. The reporting tool gives me an overview of the channels but I would love to look at a breakdown of each post performance.
You currently can't add closed caption subtitles to videos uploaded through Sprinklr so this results in having to revert to the native platform.
I would love to be able to set up a newsfeed that includes posts from a number of our partner accounts, so I can keep up to date with what they're posting.
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.
The biggest reason we renewed, and kept up with Sprinklr Modern Care is because it is an active community and there is customer buy-in already. They continue to update and improve the product, but more importantly, the customers are using it. It's easy to switch products when it's not an active component in your daily structure, but switching and migrating the data or providing alternatives becomes difficult when customers have grown accustomed to a specific experience. As long as they continue to improve the available features and the community stays active, renewed use will continue.
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.
I've spent year designing products so I'm a tough judge when it comes to other solutions. It's clear that Sprinklr Modern Care was designed for the average online consumer with a very user friendly interface. They have made improvements to the admin tools to make that area of the product easier to use as well.
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.
No issues with system availability. They manage updates in off-peak hours and I usually don't notice the changes until I log into the system the next day.
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
Performance is great and is not negatively effecting our processes. We have to make sure it doesn't effect out load times. Not currently seeing any issues with widgets affecting page load times.
I know the Sprinklr conference calls have been helpful, but sometimes submitting a ticket can be a little daunting. In the past, we've included information in screenshots that are then asked for by a member of the support staff. The turnaround time has been between 3 days, which isn't horrible.
Basic setup took me less than 30 minutes. This includes initial configuration, putting in the initial content, and getting the look-and-feel customized. The domain routing took the normal lag time any other website or blogging service. The really important thing was to get the user accounts setup and begin seeding the system with content before a public launch.
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.
First, we had a social studio which was good in terms of functionalities but slow. After that, we had the chance to use Talkwalker & social bakers which were good tools yet not enough compares to Sprinklr
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.
Improved self-support. Many customers are able to find answers to their questions without even posting to our community
Excellent peer support. Our customers excel at helping each other. We are lucky to have community members who are experts at our product and many of them are generous with their time and assist newcomers before our community managers are able to!
