Hull CDP (discontinued) vs. Planhat

Hull is definitely the leading CDP for the small to mid-sized business in which the marketing team wants or needs to have a fair amount of autonomy from engineering, or when it's unrealistic or cost-prohibitive to use internal engineering resources to maintain the marketing database. It's also a great choice for companies who are trying to bring newer and smaller best-of-breed elements into place in their marketing--enabling you to sync customer data records to CTAs/ Chat scenarios/ Email Service Providers, or any type of 3rd party campaign tools. It's probably not the best fit for companies trying to stay in a larger Marketing Cloud Ecosystem, e.g. Adobe/ Oracle.

Incentivized

For someone working in the Customer Success team, Planhat is a must-have software. All your client-level data can be easily managed, stored, and reviewed at any point in time by Planhat. It also helps the management and the leadership team better see each account and its usage. It also helps in identifying potentially risky customers and taking the required actions to engage and retain the account. It also gets integrated easily with other meeting recording tools wherein the summary from the tool gets easily synced with Planhat

Incentivized

• Slack integration - we revolve around slack as our central comm hub and having our customer information surfaceable is just gold.
• Making back-end data easy to read and digest - there is a lot of data that gets generated by our customers and it's impossible to sift through without Hull consolidating that information for us.
• Customer support - we have only had a couple issues in the many months using Hull and it's always been a quick resolution. They use Slack to support BTW which I love.

Incentivized

• Reporting - you can set up filters with boolean criteria to give you insight into everything you need to know.
• Playbooks - these are very good for less-experienced CSM's who need a step-by-step guide on how to deal with different stages of the customer lifecycle. More experienced CSM's may not need the playbooks.
• Usage data for customers - there's a wide range of charts in Planhat that tell the story of client consumption.

Incentivized

• Needs a deduplication engine
• Needs to be able to perform bulk and automated data cleansing (unified data is messy)
• Needs to integrate with more tools
• Needs to be able to be tailored to different use cases, such as a retail/ecommerce use case, with RFM metrics

Incentivized

• Allow for cc'ing of AEs or others within the same organization from the messaging center. When I went to send a message from within Planhat, I had to manually type out the AE's email address every time if I wanted them cc'd.
• The fonts were funky if I went to add text into an existing email template. For example, if I added in an extra sentence or paragraph, in Outlook on the recipient's end, the font was different despite looking the same within Planhat. Gmail was all consistent, Outlook was showing a different font.

Incentivized

It takes a while to learn Planhat even for experienced users. It has limitations in terms of what data you can present where, but its important to set internal guides outside Planhat as well so everybody working collaborative. But as CSM Planhat is a great- and critical tool which I use daily to optimise my work schedule and customer interaction with various topics.

Incentivized

The support team couldn't be better. They are quick to respond, very helpful, and thorough. Our CS manager was always happy to schedule calls to go through specific feature queries and she ensured we had a smooth and quick setup.

We had initially identified Segment as a solution due to the number of integrations they supported. The problem is that with Segment we would have still had to build and maintain a database along with query tools. Overall Hull emerged as a better starting point for us

Incentivized

I was not the person involved in choosing Planhat, but it seems to me that Planhat is much better suited to an account management style role, whereas Hubspot is closer to a sales CRM instead. In my position, Planhat is better suited as it is more graphical, more flexible, and easier to find information on.

Incentivized

• Positive: No longer asking engineering for customer activity data
• Positive: Allowing additional data integrations for where our customer activity data can be seen

Incentivized

• Planhat has, for the first time, given us a 360-degree view of all our customers and access to all the different types of communication we have with them across different departments and functions.
• The ability to automate workflows, tasks, and assign playbooks to the various phases of our customer lifecycle has aligned all our departments.